iSCSI finds fans in Australian channel

The Australian market may finally be ready for iSCSI storage, if the experience of Sydney specialist distributor Lan 1 is any guide.

John Wellar, director of advanced storage systems at Lan 1, said iSCSI had advantages that were seemingly starting to outweigh the disadvantages – at least as far as the Australian market was concerned.

“It's amazing the interest we're getting,” he said. “People are really seriously looking at it.”

Wellar wouldn't give actual sales figures, but said the distributor used to shift one or two iSCSI products a month, but in recent months iSCSI sales had leapt to between two and five a week.

“We expect it to move up to 50 percent of our storage services if not more. That's huge,” he said. “It's not anywhere near there yet, but it's looking at going that way.”

iSCSI product had entered the market some 18 months back, but takeup had been consistently slow until now, he added.

Wellar said iSCSI could provide full redundancy, without any point of failure. Although slower, it was also cheaper than competing storage technologies, such as Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP).

“It fits the Australian market because generally our companies overall in Australia are much smaller than in America or Europe,” he said.

Wellar said other technologies could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy. For a $1 million company, that represented 10 percent of revenue.

iSCSI, on the other hand, might only cost tens of thousands – a considerable saving and much more affordable for Australia's many SMBs. “For most companies, the speed of iSCSI is fast enough,” he said.

Lan 1 was finding iSCSI items from Snap Appliance and Adaptec particularly popular with its customers, Wellar said.

“What we're finding is that people combine block-level iSCSI and the file system, which is traditionally NAS,” he said.

iSCSI – internet Small Computer System Interface – is an IP storage networking standard for linking data storage repositories. iSCSI carries SCSI commands over IP networks.

Because it increases the capacity of a network for storage data transmission, it has been tipped as a big boost for the SAN market. iSCSI can also be used to transmit data over WANs and LANs.