The looming SAN storm in the SMB market: part 1 of a roundtable discussion on the emerging SAN market for small to medium-sized businesses sponsored by Computer Associates, Dell, Emulex, Intel and Microsoft

Computer Technology Review, June, 2004

Marrone-Hurley: So from a technological perspective, are Fibre Channel SANs really the right way to go, or should they be going iSCSI? Or do we just want to give them those choices? Any ideas, from a technological perspective?

Smith: The answer is ... "yes." [laughter] Mike and Claude made some interesting comments, and I may disagree in part with what they said. I think, in terms of data reliability, of course, everyone has the same needs; nobody wants to put their data at risk. But in terms of access to that data, either via performance or what we think of in terms of high availability, I think there are different needs. Certainly, a bank or an airline that's taking reservations has different needs for access to data than a dentist's office or a small business that can reboot occasionally to get around problems. So there are different needs in that sense that can drive to--what I think Marc said--in terms of reducing features to the minimum required to get the job done. That is, you save cost partly by technology--as Mike talked about--but you also save cost by reducing the feature set. And that's exactly what we're doing in Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel does not have to be expensive. Fibre Channel has been expensive because it's been targeted at data centers because that's where the market was. Now there's a market for SMB. Companies are coming out with products that are targeted at that market, priced right for that market, have the feature set and ease of use required for that market. And it's a proven, stable technology. I absolutely would advocate going to Fibre Channel today, if you want to do a small SAN in SMB. There's no better choice out there.

Padovani: The technology doesn't matter because it has to be abstracted for the small business customer. If you start talking about iSCSI or Fibre Channel, they'll glaze over. When we look at it, the bottom line for the SAN ... it's cost. The lack of interoperability drove costs up because suppliers had to do a lot of interoperability lab testing. It also meant that you couldn't have a lot of direct sales because if you brought all your products out there for the customer to just order online, then you wouldn't know how they were going to implement them. You were going to get a call. It drives up the cost of support, and it drives up the whole cost of the solution. Now that standards have been introduced to the market, there's more interoperability. People are also simplifying the management. And once that layer of management is very abstracted, to be very easy to use, the technology shouldn't matter for the customer. It's what are you looking for from a performance and an ability standpoint, and which is the simplest to implement in my environment? So I really don't think that it matters what technology the customer is going to use. That's going to be abstracted for them.

Lorenson: I agree one hundred percent. For us, it's to really provide a choice for the customer. And if our customer is more geared towards Fibre Channel, and they want to go Fibre Channel, we will enable that. Same thing for iSCSI. On that line, we're making sure that our storage technology that we're deploying to make a platform easier on a SAN, be it VDS or VSS or MPIO--which are important technologies in terms of failover and data protection issues--we are making sure they work with Fibre Channel and iSCSI so that the customer really has a complete choice and can go one way or the other.