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Shipra Arora
The migration from direct-attached storage to iSCSI is emerging as one of the growth markets for the season, primarily driven by first time network storage deployments among SMBs. The technology is gaining traction as SMB storage environments gain complexity warranting the need to move to networked storage.
However, the iSCSI market is still awaiting ramp-up and the accelerated run-up that vendors had expected of it a few years back. According to Sumit Mukhija, business development manager, Cisco Systems, India and SAARC, “While overall networked storage adoption has been very high, the iSCSI adoption, in particular, has been a bit on the slower side.”
With a large legacy presence in the data center segment, and being the de facto choice for mission critical applications, FC SAN will continue to be the dominating protocol of choice for SANs. According to industry experts, even while the momentum has started picking up in the last one year and will further accelerate with the growing number of iSCSI implementations, the technology is not going to replace Fibre Channel SANs (FC SAN) any time soon. The odds continue to be highly skewed in favor of the traditional fibre at least for the next 2-3 years.
However, with the ability to afford cost-effective and affordable SAN, iSCSI is lowering the entry level barrier for storage consolidation and opening up the floodgates of networked storage for SMBs. Spurring in its wake, a whole new trend of mainline proliferation of networked storage among the cost conscious small and medium enterprises.
Market Facts
According to industry experts, iSCSI SANs will proliferate the market in 2006 and beyond. As per IDC, the worldwide iSCSI market will more than double this year, reaching $842 mn, up from $314.1 mn in 2005. Expected to surpass the $1 bn mark in 2007.
According to IDC, in India, the IP SAN market stood at $4.54 mn in 2005, a growth of almost 200% over the previous year. According to Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India & SAARC, the adoption rate has picked up considerably over the last two years and is bound to grow in the coming years. “It has grown from being a connectivity tool to a niche in itself,” he adds.
Vasan, co-founder of Sanat Technologies, explains that in the technology adoption curve, iSCSI is in a place where the market is getting educated about the technology, and is curious to know more and adopt.
Storage vendors are gung ho about the Indian iSCSI market opportunity, foreseeing faster growth rates as compared to the other markets worldwide. “Part of the reason is that there is a huge market in India that will deploy networked storage for the first time and can straightaway migrate from Direct Attached to iSCSI, without having to necessarily consider FC SAN,” says Soumitra Agarwal, director, Marketing, NetApp.
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