iSCSI Becomes Official Storage Standard

The Internet Enginerring Task Force said iSCSI is now formally recognized as a standard by the data storage community.

by Clint Boulton of internetnews.com [February 13, 2003]

Folks in the storage industry have been talking about iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) for so long, those new to the sector would swear was already a fixture. But Tuesday marked the official ratification of iSCSI (pronounced "I-scuzzy") by its master, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Bryce Mackin, Marketing Chair for the Storage Networking Industry Association IP Storage Forum, which worked closely with IETF on the development and ratification of iSCSI, confirmed the culimination of some two and a half years of semantics tinkering and negotiating on Wednesday.

Considered one of the most crucial technologies to pave the way for speedier storage area network (SAN) deployment, iSCSI is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage systems. iSCSI carries SCSI commands over IP to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. Now that IP networks are more commonplace, iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet.

What the news means for the industry, is that those who are inclined may go full bore into the development of iSCSI products and market adoption.

"The big thing about this is that it removes that 'emerging' tag from iSCSI," Mackin said. "This allows end users to move forward to work on the development and deployment of iSCSI solutions with confidence. There had been some reluctance to apply the iSCSI broadly because it had not been formally recognized as a standard."

iSCSI has seen its share of controversy over the last few years, with analysts and developers arguing about its ability to gain traction in the market, and because it competes with a particularly ingrained method storage data transmission over IP networks—Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), which translates Fibre Channel control codes and data into IP packets for transmission between remote Fibre Channel SANs.

One of the main advantages of the younger iSCSI standard is that it can run over existing Ethernet networks. FCIP can only be used in conjunction with Fibre Channel technology. Vendors such as Cisco, Adaptec, Intel, and IBM have introduced iSCSI-based products.

Industry reaction to the news was a consensus of "It's about time."

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, said: "The industry just pulled its finger out of the dyke."

Mike Karp, senior analyst, Enterprise Management Associates, said: "As a matter of fact, a year ago would have been even more timely, but the players couldn't get together fast enough."

An Adaptec employee, Mackin said the parties behind iSCSI cleared the interoperability hurdle that made blessing the standard sooner difficult. Parties are on the same page.

"Anyone who implements [iSCSI] should just be able to plug and play," Mackin said.

A technical assessment of iSCSI may be viewed here.

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