World's Largest iSCSI SAN?

In response to our latest list of the world's biggest SANs, a reader writes: "It would be nice to see this broken down by technology, i.e., the Worlds Largest Fibre Channel SAN and the World’s Largest iSCSI SAN."

It's a great idea, proffered by Alan Shepherd, CEO of Axstor Ltd., an iSCSI VAR in the U.K. This past September, Axstor installed a 96-Tbyte SAN for the Sunderland City Council in England, constructed to provide every child in the city of Sunderland with personal storage space. Shepherd says the SAN is about to be expanded to 132 Tbytes. "But I am sure that bigger iSCSI SANs must exist," he writes.

It wouldn't surprise us. After all, iSCSI is viewed by analysts as one of the fastest-growing areas of storage networking. And while many observers have cited iSCSI as chiefly a technology for SMB adoption, IDC Analyst Brad Nisbet sees iSCSI as a potential vehicle for virtualized environments.

"[W]e believe that iSCSI will be a preferred storage protocol to support the back-end storage in virtualized server environments (VMWare)," Nisbet wrote in an email to Byte and Switch last week.

So we're turning once again to our readers: Do you know of an enormous, enterprise-scale iSCSI SAN? Do you have one yourself? Contact us by email, call us, or hit that message board below.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.