A new player in iSCSI is making noise about its products. Open-E, a company based in Germany has just opened offices in the United States and makes iSCSI initiators and targets that can be used by OEMs or integrators in their products.
Open-E’s iSCSI-R3 is a component, which the company dubs Disk on Module (DoM) that plugs into a server’s internal USB or compatible port. The DOM appears to the server as a drive. It contains initiator software that Open-E claims is between two and six times faster than Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator.
The company’s iSCSI-R3 target software can be added to a standard Pentium or Xeon server. It supports ATA, Serial ATA and SCSI RAID controllers, as well as Fibre Channel and 10Gbps Ethernet.
The company, which was founded in 1998, has approximately 60 employees located in Poland, the Ukraine, Germany, Japan and the United States. It focuses on the small and midsize business markets.
IDC’s predictions for iSCSI companies such as Open-E are big. The research firm predicts a 75.8% increase in iSCSI revenue between 2005 and 2010. The firm estimates that by 2010, iSCSI revenue will be around $5.1 billion or 20% of the external disk storage market, up from $305 million or 3% of the external disk storage market in 2005.