Fiber channel's funeral march

Fiber Channel is the king of enterprise storage-area-network technologies. It's fast, it can handle long distances, and it's got strong vendor support.

ISCSI, however, is the heir apparent. When it comes to new SANs, add-ons to existing systems or departmental-level installations at large enterprises that have Fiber Channel, customers increasingly are choosing iSCSI. And when iSCSI over 10 Gigabit Ethernet comes online, the biggest remaining hurdle to adopting iSCSI storage -- its perceived slow performance -- will fall. At that point, iSCSI will become the storage interconnection transport of choice across the enterprise.

How soon until that happens? Analysts expect support for 10G Ethernet will be built into enterprise storage arrays and servers within the next three years. This means IT executives need to start learning about iSCSI now, begin asking their storage vendors about their iSCSI road maps and begin planning for an orderly migration to iSCSI.

The ascendance of iSCSI is backed by four reasons:

Cost. An iSCSI storage solution running on familiar Ethernet infrastructure costs a fraction of a high-end Fiber Channel solution in terms of the technology and the expertise needed to run it, IT experts say.

Staffing. Finding good Fiber Channel talent can be a challenge, and the scarcity drives up the cost. "It's hard to hire people with Fiber Channel expertise," says Andrew Reichman, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Compliance mandates. The growing list of industry and government mandates about the handling of data -- Sarbanes-Oxley, credit card regulations -- is driving companies to think out their storage and archiving policies carefully. The need to digitize documents, from simple forms to X-rays, likewise motivates companies to get their storage houses in order as inexpensively as possible without sacrificing utility and reliability.

Virtualization. "Server virtualization is a big driver," says John Sloane, analyst with Info-Tech Research Group. Many midsize companies that may not have invested in network storage because of cost now look to consolidate more of their Windows and x86 architecture with VMware. "To get the best benefit from VMware [for] disaster recovery, high availability and advanced data protection, you're really driven toward putting the virtual-machine files and data on a SAN," he says.

Cases in Point

When VMware added iSCSI support last year, another hurdle to adoption fell away. That means companies that "may have been on the fence about purchasing network storage or staying with direct-attached storage now have a trigger that helps them see networked storage," Sloane says. The confluence of these trends has led Burton Group analyst Nik Simpson to refer to Fiber Channel as "dead technology walking."

Many customers aren't waiting for 10G Ethernet; they're finding plain old Ethernet has more than enough horsepower to get the job done. That's the case for the IT department of Clackamas County, Oregon, which has moved from Fiber Channel to an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.