The future of iSCSI continues to look bright, a view confirmed by Storage readers. Sixty percent of readers have implemented or plan to implement an iSCSI-based storage system in the next 24 months, with 18% not quite ready to take the leap and 22% opting against it. Not surprisingly, the majority of those with an iSCSI strategy are planning an end-to-end local SAN.
But despite iSCSI's appeal, it doesn't look like Fibre Channel (FC) will be going anywhere either. Storage administrators who have FC in place seem well-satisfied with it. Sixty percent of respondents who are planning to include iSCSI will also continue to deploy FC, while 24% will use iSCSI to connect to an FC SAN. Of those respondents who indicated that they weren't ready to or wouldn't add iSCSI, 68% indicated they would expand their FC SAN instead. "I'm of the opinion that for a Unix/Linux environment, FC is a much better way to go," one respondent wrote, adding that "if we did not have an FC SAN in place, then the perceived cost difference would certainly push us to consider iSCSI."
--Trina MacDonald
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This was first published in November 2006