But Voltaire concedes that not many will bother with its iSCSI-to-InfiniBand-to-Fibre-Channel offering unless they already have decided to go with InfiniBand. "The assumption today is that the customer has selected InfiniBand to improve the performance of their database," says Somekh.
All the same, observers say, Voltaire's iSCSI-over-InfiniBand system is impressive in that it delivers iSCSI in a way that meets the needs of the data center.
"They may have come at it orthogonally, but the novelty of this solution to me is that they've created what is probably the highest-performing iSCSI solution in the market," says Arun Taneja, founder of consulting firm Taneja Group.
While Voltaire may be the first IB vendor to move to iSCSI, it's actually trailing two competitors, InfiniCon Systems Inc. and Topspin Communications Inc., in delivering storage connectivity. Topspin is using SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) over InfiniBand for storage connectivity; meanwhile, InfiniCon uses its own proprietary InfiniFibre protocol -- which it says supports SRP -- to provide access to FC storage.
Somekh notes that iSCSI is a much more widely supported protocol -- which means applications won't need to be rewritten to support it. He says Voltaire's iSCSI implementation works with the Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows iSCSI initiator today.
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