There's been a lot of talk about the promise that iSCSI holds for the future of cost-effective storage, but not much action. Enter DataPeer, a NJ-based firm that's melding its software with third-party hardware to make iSCSI a household word for SMEs.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [September 26, 2002]

The Internet small computer system interface (iSCSI) standard has been heralded as the low-cost solution for delivering high-end storage services to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

For advocates of Internet SCSI (iSCSI), it's always been clear that the protocol could deliver SAN-based technologies to SMEs, which could otherwise not afford to deploy a fibre channel SAN. While the protocol looks great on paper, few service providers have been quick to adopt the standard and put it to work for SMEs. Not so for Fort Lee, New Jersey-based DataPeer, the all-Cisco house has been delivering iSCSI services to small businesses for over a year.

Alan Koifman, DataPeer technical research leader, said the company was interested in storage systems at an early date, and was interested in iSCSI before it was available.

"After the management team sold 9NetAvenue, a dedicated colocation and hosting business, to Concentric (which became part of XO), our CEO Michael Kofman started a storage-focused company," Koifman said. "We started by creating products such as software tools and were interested in iSCSI before it was available. We wanted an IP-to-SAN bridge for clients who wanted access to our SAN without colocating in our data center."

Cisco released a key product, the Cisco SN 5420, on April 9, 2001. DataPeer was already a Cisco shop, so choosing the Cisco iSCSI product over its competitors was a simple decision.

Koifman noted, "we needed something that was 100 percent operational. We looked at SANRAD, at virtualization packages like those from FalconStor, but Cisco uses the open iSCSI standard. Also, we're a Cisco shop. All of our hardware is Cisco."

With one fibre channel port and one Gigabit Ethernet port, the product, initially priced at $27,000, was meant only for those who already have the resources to own and run a SAN. But DataPeer is a specialized storage service shop providing data backup and recovery services as well as storage and consulting services, so it had the resources and technical expertise to deploy the Cisco SN 5420.

Koifman noted that the product was useful only for a specific class of customer.

"iSCSI is in its infancy. People are starting to adopt it and to understand it, but we find that we still have to educate people through our solutions and implementations," Koifman said. "It's best for those applications that need storage to be local and cannot get to a data center and cannot use a NAS."

For example, Koifman explained, "we have a company that is very small and does not have sophisticated IT skills. They record messages that are used in automated telemarketing calls. Their audio files can be large, and they can send them to our data center, where the files can be directly accessed through iSCSI as if our SAN was directly attached to their application. They could not use NAS because the application needed its own storage, and they did not want to commit to a presence in our data center."

In short, the product allowed the company to extend its customer reach, working with any network that could obtain a reliable connection to the data center. Before the Cisco SN 5420, potential customers had been restricted to those who could maintain a physical presence in DataPeer's facilities.

As the price of the product declines, and interest in the technology increases, it seems certain that iSCSI adoption will grow. Of course, as the iSCSI standard is finalized, these Cisco products are sure to meet ever increasing competition. But for an all-Cisco shop like DataPeer, there's no question that the company is happy to use its gear. Because DataPeer is using Cisco products, the company is a about year ahead of those left waiting for the finalized iSCSI protocol—and all promises that the products bring to the storage solutions marketplace.

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