iSCSI: Maximizing FC SAN Investments With iSCSI

Businesses have made significant investments in their Fibre Channel storage area networks or FC SANs. The challenge is to leverage the FC SAN so that these investments in capital equipment, staff, and infrastructure deliver ever-increasing value to the business. The majority of the FC SAN investments are not raw disk capacity, but infrastructure costs such as: disaster recovery mechanisms, high availability systems, backup, monitoring, security, and resource allocation tools. Equipment investments include: FC switches, routers, storage enclosures, host HBAs and backup devices. Soft dollars include management, staff, software agents, upgrades, maintenance, and facility.

Increased FC SAN ROI and value comes by increasing productivity, which means adding more users, encompassing a greater number of application servers, and expanding the total amount of hosted data. Many businesses have been reluctant to put more servers and clients on the SAN. High per server attachment costs and management complexity are major factors limiting the expansion of FC SAN's.

This has created a dilemma for many IT managers who want to fully utilize their FC SANs but find it difficult to justify the addition of more servers or clients.