IP SANs Matriculate

There's been a flurry of activity surrounding IP SAN technology recently, but many enterprise users still seem wary of getting in on the action. Educational institutions, however -- which traditionally have been among the earliest early adopters of any new information technology -- have been flocking to the technology from the start.

IP storage startups like LeftHand Networks and Sanrad, along with big switch vendors like Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), say that they have been landing one university customer after another, and that they expect to see continued strong traction in the space.

"Education in general seems to be moving pretty rapidly towards IP SANs," says Zophar "Zogood" Sante, Sanrad's VP of market development. "Of our early adopters of IP SANs, about 75 percent were educational institutions." He adds that universities still represent more than a third of the company's approximately 60 customers.

Universities, of course, have long been eager to experiment with new technologies. "Universities can afford to be a bit more experimental because they have students that can look at a new technology and see if they can make it work," says Data Mobility Group analyst John Webster. "Educational environments are ideal for trying new things."

When it comes to storage over IP, a number of additional factors also explain why educational institutions are picking up the technology quickly, analysts say. Universities typically already have large, intricate IP networks in place to link their dispersed departments and institutions, as well as to share information with other schools. And while these places of learning generally have exploding storage needs and growing performance requirements, they don't usually have the budgets necessary to deploy Fibre Channel SANs in each individual department."How do you think IP got into the corporate world? It came in through the education sector," says IDC analyst Rick Villars. "That is certainly a community that understands IP, and they're going to be some of the first that are going to be willing to experiment... An absolutely vital part of any IP storage strategy is to get it deployed in the education world."

Enrolling at U of IP

Sterling Griffin, IT manager for the Department of Pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is one such early adopter of IP SANs. "The main benefit with iSCSI is that you can reuse your existing subsystems," he says. "It's not proprietary. If you use Fibre Channel -- they might say it's not proprietary, but anyone who's ever worked with it knows it is." [Ed. note: Fibre Channel is technically an industry standard but FC switches from different vendors have exhibited notoriously poor interoperability over the years -- see Has Brocade Seen Interop Light?.]

Griffin says he started looking for a way to move the 14 servers under his direction off a direct-attached storage model and onto a network about two years ago. He looked at SAN storage systems from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) but couldn't afford them. The cost, he says, "exceeded our entire budget." [Ed. note: Talk about your pathology!]

At a time when most iSCSI equipment was just vaporware, he decided to sign up to beta test Sanrad's iSCSI switches. The department has yet to move all of its storage to IP, Griffin says, but is planning to gradually replace all the servers with those that are iSCSI enabled. "The installation was fairly easy," he says. "The switches work with our existing technologies and standard IP connection. We're just using a different initiator."Ease of implementation was also one of the main reasons why the Cancer Therapy & Research Center, a not-for-profit medical treatment and research organization, decided to deploy an iSCSI SAN between its research site and its treatment site last year, according to Mike Luter, the organization's CTO.

Connecting the center's two sites -- which are 22 miles apart -- with Fibre Channel wasn't practical or affordable. But running iSCSI over its existing IP network was simple, says Luter. The center, which already has an all-Cisco IP network, decided to go with the equipment giant for iSCSI as well. "We were able to utilize that MAN to accomplish what we needed for storage at no real additional cost," he says. "The infrastructure was already there, so we only had to buy the storage routers from Cisco."

The Cancer Therapy & Research Center also bought an EMC Clariion 4700 for each of its two locations, Luter says.

Picking up Momentum

A year ago, many in the industry had lost all hope that iSCSI would ever sneak out of the closet. But this year, the protocol has been on a roll.The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved the iSCSI specification as a proposed standard back in February, and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) launched its iSCSI initiator in June, causing a wave of vendor optimism that mainstream adoption of the protocol was right around the corner (see iSCSI Gets Go-Ahead, Microsoft Sparks iSCSI Liftoff, and Panel: iSCSI Clear for Takeoff).

But while the growing chatter around IP storage mainly revolves around iSCSI, some vendors and end users claim that proprietary IP SAN technologies work just as well. One such company is LeftHand, which currently has 50 customers -- five of which are educational institutions -- using its proprietary IP SAN storage arrays. Universities "have limited budget dollars and limited headcount, [but] they're tired of sitting on the sidelines wishing that they could deploy a SAN," says David Bangs!, LeftHand's VP of sales and marketing.

In fact, according to Dave Vigneau, a graduate student currently functioning as director of IT at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., LeftHand's technology is even easier to deploy and cheaper than many of the iSCSI solutions out there. The college, which was outgrowing its direct-attached storage and the EMC Clariion 4500 it was using for file sharing, is in the process of moving its storage to an IP SAN based on LeftHand's Network Storage Module (NSM) hardware.

"We did do research on Fibre Channel, and we talked to a couple other companies about IP SANs, but LeftHand's price per byte was much cheaper than everyone else," Vigneau says. "In some ways it's even easier than an iSCSI network."

While LeftHand insists it's planning on adding iSCSI to its portfolio going forward, Bangs says the company has yet to lose a single business opportunity on the protocol issue. "ISCSI is only a protocol," he says. "ISCSI in and of itself won't allow you to virtualize, or to do block over IP. ISCSI really isn't the issue."That must mean that LeftHand didn't try to win the University of Alabama deal that went to Sanrad. "I would not evaluate anything that is not using standard iSCSI," Griffin says.

In any case, it seems clear that a growing number of universities are opting for storage over IP. That's a good first step toward making IP SANs more mainstream, analysts say, but university customers aren't likely to make many vendors rich. "Educational institutions aren't likely to make a highly lucrative market for those selling iSCSI," says IDC's Villars. "They're simply not willing to buy at any cost."

Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch