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Getting started with IP SANs
The promise of iSCSI to offer greatly expanded functionality at a reduced cost is highly compelling, and most organizations should be investigating ways that they can pilot this technology. As "Bringing IP and Fibre Channel together" illustrates, the opportunity to expand functionality at a dramatically lower cost and to move toward an any-to-any storage architecture becomes a real possibility. While FC SANs will continue to be the domain of tier-one production applications, many tier-two and tier-three applications can leverage some of the same functionality with IP SANs.

While the adoption of any new technology requires a cautious approach, much of the functionality within IP SANs has already been proven: IP networking is mature and the steady maturation of FC storage has been leveraged in much of the development of IP storage.

By selecting appropriate applications for storage networking, following the design and implementation guidelines discussed in this article and applying solid test and evaluation processes, IP SANs can be introduced within organizations and begin to play a major role in storage environments.

Bringing IP and Fibre Channel together

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This was first published in December 2003

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