Dell and EqualLogic: two years on

Asthana: iSCSI is the future of enterprise storage

Dell acquired iSCSI specialist EqualLogic two years ago in a move designed to beef up its storage portfolio. Since that time, the storage market has changed, as growing interest in virtualisation placed new demands on infrastructure, and the economic downturn made organisations re-evaluate spending on costly infrastructure such as storage area networks (SANs).

However, the EqualLogic storage products have "exceeded all expectations", according to Praveen Asthana, vice president of Dell's Enterprise Storage and Networking business, who believes that iSCSI will account for a growing part of the enterprise storage market in the future.

"Before the acquisition, we had about 2,000 or 3,000 storage customers, but now there are up to 12,000, about 4,000 of which are in Europe," he said.

The move has "definitely paid off", according to Asthana, as Dell's storage business is growing faster than most of the rest of the market, and has brought many benefits to the company outside the core storage area.

"It has helped us with getting into the channel. The EqualLogic guys had good channel sales, and we had not really focused much on this before," he said.

EqualLogic has also enabled Dell to build better infrastructure to serve enterprise customers seeking to deploy technologies such as virtual desktops, according to Asthana.

"One of the reasons we bought EqualLogic is that it had the best storage technology for server virtualisation. Customers who had bought into iSCSI weren't complaining [about teething problems] as much as those with other technologies, and VMware itself used EqualLogic kit for development. We looked on it as a great asset for our overall business," he explained.

EqualLogic's iSCSI products, which use standard Ethernet infrastructure to connect servers with storage arrays, have been doing well in shops that have traditionally relied on Fibre Channel technology, as well as those building new projects, according to Asthana.

This is backed by figures from Forrester Research showing very high recent adoption rates for iSCSI compared with a few years ago. Analysts had predicted 44 per cent year-on-year growth for the technology, but the actual figure has turned out to be double that at about 88 per cent.

The recession has played a role in this, Asthana said, as iSCSI has looked like a less risky option, even for large enterprises, because of its use of tried and tested Ethernet technology.

"The economic downturn gave a shock to customers, and made them look again at operating expenditure as well as capital expenditure," he explained.

Fibre Channel has very high operating costs associated with the tools and training, and needs a lot of administration, whereas iSCSI shares common tools and skills with the familiar Ethernet local area network technology, Asthana added.

And iSCSI has now "grown up" from being considered a cheap alternative to a SAN in the past, with Dell now putting the technology even into high-end storage products.

Companies have also become interested in the idea of a converged fabric, which uses a single interconnect technology for networking and storage, and iSCSI perfectly fits the bill here, although it has a rival in the shape of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which runs the Fibre Channel protocol along Ethernet connections in a similar fashion.

"The problem is that FCoE isn't ready and there are still technical issues even though some vendors have been banging the drum about it for several years, " said Asthana.

In contrast, iSCSI is already available on Gigabit Ethernet today, and lots of customers are looking at 10Gbit/s Ethernet to offer some measure of future proofing.

"On 10Gbit/s Ethernet, iSCSI offers comparable performance to 8G Fibre Channel, but is 75 per cent cheaper," Asthana claimed.

Looking to the future, Dell believes that Ethernet with iSCSI looks like becoming the interconnect technology of choice, but there will still be room in the market for others, especially where sites may have standardised on Fibre Channel some time ago.

"In five years' time, there will be more iSCSI, but you will still see Fibre Channel and FCoE. Some people will stay on Fibre Channel forever, just like some companies are still running Unix servers. If it works, you don't knock it," Asthana said.