Storage Service Provider - Enterprise Storage Service Provider (2)

As I mentioned, I'm doing a lot of things currently so what i promised to write two weeks ago is just about to be out today.

iSCSI is going to be the main driving force behind a lot of ESSPs since it's based on IP. Yes, Internet Protocol. Plain and simple. IP won the battle with all competing technologies namely token ring, ATM, etc. TCP/IP has a lot of nice features - block re-ordering (in case one packet arrives before the other, TCP/IP stack will put them in order), link aggregation (ability to put 2 links to act like 1 - or having 2x1Gb port act as 1x2Gb port), and more.

In addition, TCP/IP is not point-to-point like Fiber Channel, it could be multi-point to multi-point. So you can have multiple data centers and then you decide which combination of disaster recovery scenario you'd like to do.

Let's see if you have 3 data centers with iSCSI in each location across the US (Palo Alto (CA), Chicago (IL), New York(NY)). You can have all three iSCSI systems replicate data to each other to ensure that you have 3 copies of data.

So you'll have the following replications: CA->IL, CA->NY, IL->CA, IL->NY, NY->CA, NY->IL. What if one day your risk pattern changes? You can decide to add another data center in Timbuktu (TI) then you stop all 6 replications. Then do 3: CA->TI, IL->TI, NY->TI. With Fiber Channel technology, you need months of planning. With iSCSI, you only need a few days. If you already put iSCSI storage in TI, this exercise could finish in a day (depending on the network bandwidth).

Let's put another interesting event, what if CA site was under earthquake. Your CA offices can reroute their network traffic to TI while CA data center is under restoration. Then you setup an interim disaster recovery site in Las Vegas (NV). You can restore data from TI->NV. All this depend on the fact that you have enough network bandwidth among sites.

This is why ESSP business is very interesting for companies that own a lot of network bandwidth! They can sell you bandwidth with managed services offering such as managed storage service, managed backup service, managed disaster recovery service, managed business continuity service.

As one of my wise friends said "Outsourcing is the way of the future". Amen to that, my friend.

We'll talk about how can we get these outsourcing opportunities. (not tomorrow but soon). Have a nice day.

Storage Service Provider - Enterprise Storage Service Provider (1)

It's been a while since my last post. There are customer installations that we are working with. This could well be one of the sample today.

Enterprise Storage Service Provider is the honeypot of all Storage Service Provider. Since the start of SSP market in 1997, original SSPs were all going after this market except one (xdrive.com). As i mentioned earlier posts that Fiber-Channel storage technology is not cost-effective. So those SSPs were gone with the Dot-Com boom. Last year Xdrive.com was purchased by AOL for an undisclosed sum.

Since the beginning of iSCSI, I was looking at the potential that it could change the IT storage market place by the fact that iSCSI is IP-based. Since IP already won the Internet war with other network technologies. So IP is likely to beat Fiber-Channel in the next 3 - 5 years.

The strengths of iSCSI over FC are 1. IP-based, 2. multi-point to multi-point, 3. media independent, 4. economy of scale, 5. scalability

1. IP-based technology: IP technology comes with a lot of nice features and a lot of not-so-nice features.
1.1 The nice features of IP are trunking (ability to combine multiple IP links to act as one), block reordering (if one network packet arrives before its predecessor, it will be put in a queue), retransmission, autonegotiation, routing, and etc.
1.2 The not-so-nice features of IP are mostly security and security. The first is encryption, iSCSI fixed this by allowing IP-based solution (such as VPN) to work with iSCSI's native solution (IP-SEC). The second is authentication. Since IP technology is multi-point to multi-point, anyone can pose as someone else. The only way to fix this is to include CHAP authentication to iSCSI. So these two are already fixed. Remember that this is IP, so any IP-based solution will also work with iSCSI such as firewall (allow/deny access), access control list (router), or VPN (data encryption during transport).

2. Multi-point to Multi-point, this is iSCSI's main strength. FC requires point-to-point in order to communicate. If you want to build your third data center, you need a dedicated dark fiber to transport your FC (Fiber Channel) traffic. If you plan to build iSCSI infrastructure, you would only need leased line (T3, etc) and you're done. You can route traffic through IP from anywhere (multi-point) to anywhere (multi-point) as long as you have IP access unlike FC.

3. Media Independent - IP can be carried by various bearer (Copper, Fiber)

4. Economy of scale - a large number of percentage of the people on the planet are using IP as their only network access technology (Internet). You get the lower price on IP-based products.

5. Scalability - iSCSI systems now can scale up to 1PB with ease.

To summarize all 5 strengths, iSCSI is the technology on the move to the top.

If SSPs in 1997 had iSCSI technology, we should have a mature SSP market by now. Low-cost flexible iSCSI array is the driving force behind ESSP today. We'll come back and elaborate on this matter tomorrow.