Who's who in iSCSI
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Options for building low-cost IP SANs are gaining acceptance.
Options for building low-cost IP SANs are gaining acceptance. Here's a sample of leading vendors selling iSCSI products, which are the main ingredients of IP SANs.Adaptec Inc. of Milpitas, Calif.: Adaptec offers a series of adapters that can take the place of a network card, offloading the considerable amount of iSCSI packet processing usually executed by the server's processor. The company also offers a number of iSCSI RAID systems and arrays. EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass.: EMC has just introduced iSCSI versions of all but the largest of its midtier Clariion storage arrays. The iSCSI AX100i, the CX300i and the CX500I all run on Gigabit Ethernet and are controllable from Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003 servers. The CX500i can support up to 38T of raw storage. EqualLogic Inc. of Nashua, N.H.: EqualLogic's PS series of iSCSI storage arrays (PS50E, PS100E, PS100X, PS200E, PS800E and PS1600E) can offer 300-megabyte/sec retrieve time for data. The basic storage unit, at 5.6T, can perform up to 60,000 input/output procedures per second. Hewlett-Packard Co.: HP's StorageWorks IP Storage Router 2122-2 allows servers to access both Fibre Channel and iSCSI across either LANs or WANs. LeftHand Networks Inc. of Boulder, Colo.: LeftHand's architecture places a processor on each storage unit, called a cell, allowing administrators to add cells when they need more storage, with no loss of throughput. Each box comes with its own motherboard and processor and can offer either 640G, 1T or 2T of storage. MPC Computers LLC of Nampa, Idaho: MPC's iSCSI storage system, the DataFrame 420, can handle 4T of storage spread across a possible 16 drives. This system is unique in that it can perform RAID redundancy techniques across different systems, in addition to striping RAID across disks within a single system. Network Appliance Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.: Although originally known for its network attached storage systems, NetApp has been an early mover in the IP storage market. NetApp's FAS200 and FAS900 series storage systems run on iSCSI, a series that can scale up to 64T. The systems are accessed via NetApp-supplied Unix, Linux, AIX or HP/UX initiators. NetApp's near-line system, NearStore R200, also runs iSCSI. QLogic Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif.: Like Adaptec, QLogic makes a line of iSCSI host bus adapters for offloading iSCSI chores from server CPUs. NASA's Langley Research Center bought six QLA4010C adapters for its IP SAN. StoneFly Networks Inc. of San Diego: StoneFly's Storage Concentrator i3000 fuses Fibre Channel and iSCSI arrays under one management console. Managers can then dedicate volumes of storage to server-run applications.
