Obstacles to storage LANs
 
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As iSCSI technology begins to take hold, increased storage activity over an Ethernet LAN becomes more of a possibility.
There are a couple things holding back the adoption of iSCSI devices, which are just now starting to hit the market. One is the tremendous amount of bandwidth that potentially could be needed (depending on what you're doing with the storage), and the other is the processing overhead.
The first issue will lessen as more high-speed Ethernet is deployed. In some cases, storage may even be the reason that you deploy Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gigabit Ethernet.
The second issue - the processing overhead - comes from the complex operations needed to make iSCSI happen. Each request from a user to a storage device has to be converted to SCSI, encapsulated in TCP/IP and broken into packets. It may even be encrypted, if that is a requirement. On the other end, the requests have to be decrypted, unencapsulated and recombined.
All of this takes a lot of processing power, so it would make sense to use a specialized processor to handle it, on both ends of the network. These are starting to become available.
You can get more information from this Tech Update on the subject:
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In addition to writing this newsletter, Jeff Caruso edits Network World's e-mail newsletters from his office on New York's Long Island. If you would like to make suggestions about newsletter format or content, or even just express your opinion on today's topic, you can reach Jeff at jcaruso@nww.com.
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