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Rich Castagna, Editorial Director
There is a lot of hype and misinformation about storage over IP and that does a disservice to customers and to vendors that do have good products. The storage over IP products have a place in the market but "one size does not fit all". The SAN products are targeted primarily at enterprise environments with storage professional staffs and a requirement for guaranteed response time and security. Despite the BS, the storage over IP is best suited for those workgroup and departmental environments (which is the largest market, size-wise) where administration (including network) is usually done with a small group that handles everything.
The impact on SAN (remember, SAN is best suited in the enterprise) of storage over IP will be two-fold. First, confusion is created because of all the hype and BS and that will cause some delays. However, the majority of the Global 2000 enterprise operations either have already or are in the process of deploying Fibre Channel based SANs. Second, additional planning will be required because major usage will be linking SANs ? enterprise to enterprise and enterprise to departmental.
This was first published in May 2001