A Better Outlook for Information Management (Continued)

Pricing and Protocols
Prices should go down as new technologies hit the marketplace. SATA drives have been touted as a boon for low-cost storage solutions. They provide significantly faster throughput than traditional, parallel ATA drives (such as the drives found in most PCs), giving up to 50 percent speed improvements. They are also considerably less expensive than SCSI drives, which are the mainstay in storage solutions today. SATA drives have speeds of up to 150 MB per second.

Slated for release next year, SATA II drives will be boosted to 300 MB/s and SATA III drives (expected in 2007) will have speeds of 600 MB/s. While these speeds do not rival SCSI drives, the price difference between SATA and SCSI makes SATA attractive for non-mission-critical application storage requirements. Several new NAS offerings are based entirely on SATA technology.

In addition to SATA, a new storage protocol is hitting the streets: Internet SCSI (iSCSI). This protocol is designed to allow high-speed data transfers over standard TCP/IP connections. It wraps block-level storage traffic in a TCP/IP message to send over a standard network connection and unwraps it at reception. iSCSI aids small- and medium-sized businesses because it leverages standard networking technology for storage purposes. It is ideal for organizations that have already invested in more traditional fibre channel-based storage systems, because it is completely compatible with fibre channel technology. For example, a firm using two separate fibre-based systems can connect them through standard networking technologies with iSCSI.

This will also benefit disaster recovery solutions because it fully supports the notion of geographic clusters. A geographic cluster, or geocluster as it is known in the industry, is made up of a bank of servers operating in tandem to provide load balancing and fail-over services (see Figure 1). The difference a geocluster brings is that these servers are situated in separate physical locations, sometimes spanning large distances. Traditionally, it has been expensive to put geoclusters in place because of the high cost of linking sites together, but with the arrival of iSCSI, these costs should go down considerably. This means that even small- to medium-sized firms can look ahead to comprehensive, but low-cost, disaster recovery solutions.

iSCSI is expected to gain considerable momentum in the next few years, since Microsoft released a standard iSCSI driver for Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 on June 30, 2003. This means that Windows systems can connect directly to any technologies that support the protocol. In fact, Microsoft claims that more than 60 software and hardware vendors have begun developing solutions based on the new driver.

Choose your storage solution	Fibre channel options
Back to Introduction