iSCSI vs FC

[tom]

Hello,

What is the advantage of choosing FC storage over iSCSI. I believe most of the compnies use FC storage. Am I right?

[Christopher Day]

Fibre channel traditionally had higher nominal transfer rates over iSCSI. I am unsure if iSCSI has caught upto this yet. But most business's i know use FC

Advantages with iSCSI is hardware simplicity as you can run it over Ethernet.

Simplicity & Cost vs Speed i guess.

[whcdavid]

FC storage is always better, but bit expesive. It all depends on the application and how critical. FC storage sustain this bandwidth over long distances.

Jsut my 2 cents.

[Schumie]

It really depends on what situation you're in.

I've worked a fair bit with Fibre Channel, however I'm just starting to get more into iSCSI and it seems to fit the bill for the majority better than FC.

If cost isn't' a major issue, than FC would still get my vote at the moment - if you require a high number of nodes, already have a solid installed network infrastructure that is not necessarily utilised to the max, than iSCSI should fit in quite well.

[whcdavid]

Schumie,

I'm jsut wondering, what kind of storage do yo use? Do you use EMC storage?

[Schumie]

Hi David,

For one of the businesses I'm involved in, it's primarily been IBM DS's in production environments. Haven't quite had the need to get in a shark yet, although we're just counting down the days for that delivery to happen!!

Pre-production and development have the Blue Arc's and a Thumper at the moment.

The challenge is the re-processing of all the data every time the development team re-write the engines, and they need to test the effectiveness of their changes - ie: reprocessing a few hundred million audio files.

[princee18]

Most of the people prefer FC storage but the big benefit of iSCSI over FC is the native support for IPsec encryption within the IP protocol, and it should be used whenever IP traffic may fall into the wrong hands.