Asked when iSCSI will ship in volume, LSI and Eurologic gave the answer that has been standard for the last two years: Next year.

Eurologic declined to give any details about the devices it will ship, but said that they will be very very cost effective, and will use low cost Serial ATA disk drives – the latest version of PC-style ATA drive technology. It said that unlike its current iSCSI disk arrays, the new machines will offer RAID data protection.

LSI this week formally announced a combined RAID controller and iSCSI adaptor which it says it will begin sampling in May, and will ship in the third quarter. The company told ComputerWire of its plans for this device in November, when it also said it will ship an iSCSI storage array in the third quarter this year.

According to LSI, the chip will allow OEMs to produce iSCSI storage arrays which will cost only 5% to 8% more than existing DAS arrays. Eurologic said it is not using LSI’s chip in its forthcoming iSCSI RAID array, but might consider it for future devices.

Referring to suppliers such as Cisco Systems Inc which are planning to offer iSCSI as a means to extend existing Fibre Channel SANs with low-cost branch lines, a spokesman for LSI said: There are people trying to bring iSCSI from the top down into data centers, but we’re coming in for the low to mid-range customers.

The combined RAID controller and iSCSI adaptor announced by LSI is the latest member of its MegaRAID family of chips, and has been christened iMegaRAID. LSI has already said that it expects to have more success selling iSCSI adaptors than it has had selling Fibre Channel adaptors. In the Fibre Channel market there has been little incentive for OEMs to qualify LSI’s late-entering products. LSI hopes that because the same OEMs do not want iSCSI to be handicapped with the same reputation for poor interoperability as Fibre Channel, they will be more accepting of its iSCSI efforts.

Eurologic launched an iSCSI array last year, but yesterday said that machine was mostly intended as a technology demonstrator, and has only sold in small numbers. That machine uses firmware to convert disk I/Os from SCSI to iSCSI at the outport port, together with a relatively low-cost Intel adaptor card for TCP/IP offload processing.

Source: Computerwire