THIS MONTH'S FEATURE

iSCSI: Swimming the Channel

One of my favorite information technology quotations is from a non-tech source, the late President Ronald Reagan, who said, "Information is the oxygen of the modern age." True words, considering that we are very much a cyber-connected, integrated information economy. Important producers of some of this oxygen are the integrators and value-added resellers (VARs), euphemistically referred to as "the channel."

The rising popularity of iSCSI solutions in the technology market's sweet spot, small to medium businesses, offers VARs and integrators an opportunity to expand their offerings in a sound technology direction. An iSCSI infrastructure can help customers with crippling budget problems as well as growing performance needs.

iSCSI is not an incidental technology. Quantitative analysis from International Data Corporation shows that it is one of the fastest-growing areas of the storage market, projected to reach $5.1 billion by the year 2010.

In truth, VARs would be well advised to bring home the economic message when promoting iSCSI as an architectural solution. VARs can save customers thousands of dollars per host. Customers must appreciate the return on investment that the VAR is passing on to them. Indeed, an ROI sell based on the unique topology of the customer makes a telling argument where budget dollars are few and operational needs are many.

The VAR and integrator can take very few steps forward without a thoroughgoing understanding of the network and storage structures as they stand. Familiarity with the data rates of the switches, the capacity and throughput rates of their present storage resources, what resources are servicing which workstations or departments, and whether cabling is streamlined or spaghetti, an understanding of the workflow - all of these elements will play into the decision on when and whether an iSCSI infrastructure is indicated.

5 Simple Steps
To Understanding Your Current Network Storage Environment

• Network Management - Familiarization with the data rates of the switches (performance and bottlenecks)
• Storage Management - Capacity and throughput rates of present storage (performance and bottlenecks)
• System Management - Knowledge of resources servicing which workstations, servers and departments
• Data Center Management - Quality of cabling and environmental infrastructure (energy and footprint)
• Workflow Management - Information needs of the organization (internal and external customers)

iSCSI is a natural product recommendation where storage consolidation is part of the customer's IT goals. Integrators' customers often have satellite facilities housing significant volumes of mission-critical and business-critical information. Many of these remote offices isolate their data on a server-based or direct-attached island of storage. iSCSI represents a stellar solution for those SMBs wanting to transition to a network storage architecture and focus data and storage management in one controllable venue.

Manpower and budget constraints limit the type and number of off-site IT experts available to manage backups, storage capacity plans and throughput issues in situ. The presence of a part-time backup administrator is a rare event. Much more frequently, that kind of expertise can be found only in the data center. But VARs who are serious partners with their customers can ease the expertise burden by providing pre-sale consulting and post-sale infrastructure support, both as value adds to an iSCSI sell.

For the VAR and integrator, iSCSI opens up new markets, too. Although the primary focus of iSCSI resellers is SMB, the channel has a chance to swim upstream to the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), and the high-end Enterprise customer environment. There is also the Remote Office & Branch Office (ROBO) need for tying into the mother ship of corporate headquarters of most organizations. Now that 10 Gig Ethernet is both available and affordable, it is practical to make a strong and meaningful case versus 4-gigabit Fibre Channel, iSCSI's historically high-end-only SAN alternative. For those SME customers, the same pre-sale and post-sale opportunities are present. All organizations, large and small, will find compelling value from an iSCSI solution, but the jury is out as to how quickly each market segment will ramp.

Four Customer Market Environments. Which one will grow the fastest?

Finally, iSCSI has a bright future in several vertical markets such as academic and scientific computing. Vertical VARs and integrators would be well advised to consult with their vendor partners on how iSCSI meets the special needs of those vertical markets. iSCSI vendors, including iStor, that produces this newsletter, have worthwhile channel partnership programs designed to support the integrator and VAR sales efforts. And with iSCSI shaping up to be a $5-billion-dollar-plus market, there is no reason that some of this money cannot be yours.


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