Advantage iSCSI

"A SAN was too expensive," recalls Jay Walusek, vice president of server administration at Mesirow. After Microsoft added iSCSI initiators, the company researched an iSCSI SAN, settling on an iSCSI appliance from EqualLogic with 14 SATA disk drives. The appliance "virtualizes the storage for us and provides data replication at no additional cost," he adds.

Mesirow's next step is to add a second iSCSI appliance in a suburban office and run a gigabit Ethernet connection between them. "That will allow us to replicate data off site," Walusek says. The company also wants more SATA arrays for disk-to-disk or disk-to-disk-to-tape backup. Making this all possible is iSCSI, asynchronous IP connectivity and SATA disk arrays. "We get a fully populated, redundant iSCSI SAN for about $40,000 to $50,000," he says.

Source:
Storage magazine
http://storagemagazine.techtarget.com/magItem/0,291266,sid35_gci999900,00.html
August 1, 2004