Cisco Takes Another Shot at Storage Over IP
CISCO SYSTEMS INC. last week released an iSCSI/Fibre Channel over IP storage router that analysts say maps out the company’s direction in the storage networking marketplace.
The Cisco SN 5428 storage router will allow enterprise workgroups to create storage-area networks (SAN) using a combination of Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet and SCSI over IP (iSCSI) protocols over an IP network.
The 5428 is Cisco’s second foray into the storage over IP market. In April 2001, Cisco released the 5420, a gateway device that connected Fibre Channel storage devices over an IP network. That, said analysts, was a trial balloon in the Fibre Channel connectivity marketplace that proved to have few takers.
The 5428, priced at $11,995, comes with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight Fibre Channel ports and three management ports.
A Midpoint Release
Tony Prigmore, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., said the 5428 router is a midpoint iteration between the 5420 and the upcoming release of a multiprotocol, highly intelligent storage switch from San Jose-based Andiamo Systems Inc., a storage networking vendor that’s mostly owned by Cisco.
The Andiamo project, according to industry experts, is still in stealth mode.
Mike Kahn, chairman of The Clipper Group in Wellesley, Mass., said Cisco’s foray into the storage space is driven by the evolution of iSCSI as much as anything else.
ISCSI takes SCSI commands and data and encapsulates them in IP packets for transport over networks. Cisco and other storage over IP vendors, such as San Jose-based Nishan Systems Inc., are still awaiting the release of the iSCSI standard. It’s expected to be out by the end of the summer.
Also, iSCSI network interface cards have yet to be released in quantity. Without such cards, the burden of off-loading the TCP/IP commands falls on the server, eating up enormous amounts of CPU cycles.
But Kahn said Cisco’s new router “could ease some of the problems that are driven by direct-attached storage.
“What we’re tackling here is the next tier of data [such as e-mail traffic] that needs to be maintained but for whom laying a lot of Fibre Channel does not justify the expense,” Kahn said.
SAN Plan THE SN 5428 OFFERS:
• Eight 1G or 2G bit/sec. Fiber Channel ports
• Two iSCSI ports for midrange servers to extend the SAN to low-cost servers
• Logical unit number mapping and masking
• Support for 10 to 40 servers running midrange applications such as e-mail and relational databases