Comments on: Dell to buy storage company for $1.4 billion

With its planned acquisition of EqualLogic, the PC maker intends to make itself a force in what it calls "the iSCSI revolution."

[trboyden]

iSCSI is a protocol

iSCSI is a protocol for SCSI communications over ethernet via TCP/IP. It falls under the greater "Internet Standards" maintained by the IETF. While you don't have to run it over fiber, it runs a lot better if you do, and for high data volume networks, it's pretty much a guarantee that you will need to run it over fiber. Here is the IETF's information on iSCSI: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3720

[Penguinisto]

Seconded.

Running iSCSI over a 100 Mbit ethernet line is slow. GbE isn't much faster.

Truth be told, you'd get about the same (often better) performance from lashing together a cheap server with a cheap wired-SCSI array, then serving NFS and Samba/CIFS off of that.

OTOH, you can get-up a small fiber network (couple of switches, a couple of HBA's, etc) and use the higher fiber speeds server-to-server in a SAN. But if you're going to do that, iSCSI is only one of many protocols open to you by that point.

/P

[Galaxy5]

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