iSCSI Breaks Through All IT Market Tiers

MARKET WIRE
December 13, 2006

Santa Barbara, CA -- A recent end-user survey conducted by Peripheral Concepts, Inc. reveals that 37% of the 5,000 surveyed sites have implemented an iSCSI SAN, compared to less than 20% a year ago. This important market penetration involves all business tiers, challenging the early belief that iSCSI would more specifically attract small and medium sites. Twenty percent plan to purchase an iSCSI capability or extend its utilization in 2007.

Introduced only 3 years ago, iSCSI-SAN is now being used by more open system IT operations than FC-SAN which started shipping in 1998, but there is more data stored on Fibre Channel (FC). There is hardly any application that is excluded from iSCSI storage; database, email, web applications and Microsoft Exchange are among the most popular.

Concerns on security and performance that initially hindered iSCSI SAN implementations no longer constitute an obstacle.100-Megabit IP networks gave way to 1 Gb in 2005 and 2006, and 10-Gb networks will prevail in 2007 and 2008.

Some level of consolidation has been implemented by 80% of the sites. With recent technology, the trend is to consolidate NAS and SANs.

HP, IBM, EMC and Microsoft captured the bulk of the iSCSI market, but a large number of evaluations involve products from thirteen other companies.

The survey addressed a random population of 35,000 sites. 5,000 respondents managing over 1,000 petabytes (PB) of disk participated. Their input forms the basis of preliminary findings covering system configurations and implementation plans. For a selected population of over 100 IT operations, this report ranks issues and needs, and analyzes applications and plans. Data collected allows segmentation by company revenue, number of employees, industry, operating system, or disk capacity.

iSCSI and SANs is the fourth in a series of reports to be issued by the end of January 2007. Other reports cover:

• Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Data Classification
• Backup and Virtual Tape libraries (VTL)
• Data Protection and CDP
• NAS and NAS virtualization
• Data Retention, Archiving and Content Addressed Storage (CAS)

PERIPHERAL CONCEPTS, Inc. is a leading consulting firm specializing in storage and storage management. For more information, visit www.periconcepts.com under REPORTS.