Theres a pent-up interest, Villars said, emphasizing that thats not the same as a pent-up demand. People have heard about it and buy into the logic of it. Until recently, he said, the problem was that there were virtually no products available for testing, and companies had no way of knowing what iSCSI looked like in a real-world environment. Villars said he expects a lot more companies to start testing the technology over the next six months.
"iSCSI, I think, is going to take off," agreed Ed Chapman, senior director of product marketing in Ciscos Storage Technology Group.
That may well be, but at todays conference, only two of the approximately 65 attendees raised their hand when asked who was already testing iSCSI, or expected to start testing the protocol soon. One of those was Russell Quartararo, the manager of enterprise storage and data protection at pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough Corp. "We just started looking at it," he said. The company wants to connect its stray Intel-based servers to the SAN but doesnt want to pay the price of Fibre Channel. Were definitely serious... Weve got hundreds of Intel-based servers, and its not getting any smaller," he said.
Quartararo is exactly the kind of customer that most of the panelists said they expect to see latching onto the technology first. While iSCSI offers much cheaper and much simpler connections into storage area networks, as well as complete integration with existing IP infrastructures, no one expects the protocol to replace Fibre Channel anytime soon (see iSCSI's Big Bang?).
"No SAN IT manager is going to tear out their network and just replace it," Hayden told Byte and Switch after the panel discussion. Were seeing iSCSI used for new connections. He said that EqualLogic already has dozens of customers for its new iSCSI-based storage system.
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