Hi, I'm Travis Vigil, product manager for Dell's ISCSI storage solution. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about ISCSI as a technology. So to set that stage let's first talk about storage area networks. Traditionally people have deployed storage area networks using fiber technology.
What we have here is a handful of servers all connected via optical cabling using fiber channel networks. So fiber channel Hs, HVAs, fiber channel switches to a fiber channel array. And what this allows customers to do is to share the same physical storage capacity and get overall storage utilization, better storage manageability for these servers. Now, what ISCSI allows you to do is instead of using fiber technology you can use standard ethernet technology.
Standard ethernet Internet interface cards, standard ethernet switches all to deploy a storage area network at a much lower cost than you can with fiber channel. What we're showing here is the NX1950. This is a Dell product that has ISCSI target capability. I want to tell you a little bit about how you can deploy ISCSI and dispel some of the rumors and myths you may have heard about this technology.
Let's walk over to the X1950's Management Console and talk a little bit more about this. So I'm sitting here in front of the NX1950 management console and showing a typical ISCSI storage deployment scenario. So what we have here are a couple of ISCSI disks on the NX1950 ISCSI target in a clustered configuration. You can see that these discs look just like standard discs that you would have in a server. And that's really the beauty of a storage area network, whether that be fiber channel or ISCSI.
The discs on the ISCSI target appear to the servers as though they're local discs. So any application that's ever been written can run on a local disk. But in actuality that disk resides on the physical storage area network. Again, that gives you better storage utilization, easier manageability, overall lower total cost of ownership. So for those of you familiar with storage area networks, fiber channel and ISCSI, you're probably aware that there's been a lot of discussion in the industry about where ISCSI may or may not be better or worse than fiber channel.
And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the misperceptions of ISCSI as a technology. There's three areas that there are misperceptions on ISCSI. The first is around performance. Many people think that because fiber channel runs at four gigabits per second and ISCSI runs at one gigabit per second that fiber channel is four times fast as ISCSI. But in fact if you look at typical applications, the bottleneck isn't the width of your pipe but it's how fast you can go to a disk and get I/O from that disk back to the server.
So in many real world applications ISCSI is actually comparable in performance to fiber channel, and if you look at Dell's own products, for example, our CX320 and 340, we've published white papers that show that for an exchange-type application you're going to get comparable performance for ISCSI or fiber channel. Again, that's because your bottleneck isn't the pipe. It's getting I/O from the disk to the server. The second misperception is around security.
Many people here are ISCSI they think Ethernet, IP, they think the ethernet and they think it's not secure for your storage area network data. But in fact if utilizing proper IP network, Ethernet network best practices, you can get an equivalent level of security on an ISCSI network as you do on a fiber channel network. Just by implementing a VLAN and turning off routing to that VLAN or just for simplicity you could actually put a separate back end Ethernet switch on your ISCSI network and get the same level of security as you would have on fiber channel.
The third and final area where people have misperceptions around ISCSI is with respect to manageability. There's been a lot of talk that fiber channel may be easier to manage than ISCSI because you can in certain instances manage the switch, the HVA and the storage array all from the same management pane. In fact, ISCSI takes the network management and puts that network management where it should reside, with your network administrator. So every network administrator on the planet knows what to do to manage an ISCSI network.
Now, they may not know that it's ISCSI traffic but if you say I need a VLAN for this traffic they'll know what to do. And with respect to array management, the array management for ISCSI and fiber channel is exactly the same. So in terms of manageability, ISCSI is actually easier to manage than fiber channel, because there's more people that know how to manage that network, that Ethernet network, than people know how to manage a fiber channel network.
So in conclusion, ISCSI offers a compelling solution for anybody who wants to deploy a storage area network but doesn't want to spend the expense that they would have to spend on fiber channel. Again, for many real world applications you're going to get the same performance out of ISCSI as you would with fiber channel. If you have any more questions on ISCSI and the solution that Dell offers, you can either contact your sales representative or go to Dell.com/ISCSI. Thanks for your time.
