The concept of “utility” services has not escaped IT professionals within large organizations. Electricity water and phones, are utilities, they are consistent wherever we go, are delivered with varying degrees of reliability, and we can have access to a lot or a little depending on out needs. Everything from making coffee to powering factory equipment to building automobiles uses the same basic electricity.

Today, whether we’re at work or home, we don’t think twice about plugging our appliances into electrical outlets to instantly receive the power we need. After all, every house in America does not have its own power plant so why should every department within a large organization have its own IT infrastructure?

* Centralized data protection and security

In contrast, large businesses deploying utility storage are more concerned with performance, efficient storage utilization, guaranteed storage availability and future scalability costs. Storage area networks or SANs, based on IP, represent the more popular way of interconnecting a large number of application servers with different classes and grades of storage systems. They have a low number of servers and small IT departments. But a single iSCSI array represents a single point of failure, can be difficult to scale and limits performance to that of the individual system. iSCSI arrays, like NAS systems, are single systems that can centralize storage for a small number of attached servers.

They don’t need to build a storage utility model to service multiple departments and large numbers of servers. Small businesses are interested in simplicity and low costs, and will generally select an entry-level iSCSI array. Surprisingly, many small businesses are not interested in utility storage.

* Infinite storage capacity that can be resized, reused, reallocated and shared

Server captive data is difficult to protect, reallocate, share and reproduce when it’s kept on disk drives within individual servers. Removing data from workflow and departmental servers and delivering storage to those servers like a utility has been an IT goal for the last 10 years.

There are three basic attributes that distinguish IP SANs from iSCSI storage arrays. (Figure 1)

Before any user decides on the appropriate utility storage solution, they should consider the architectural attributes of an IP SAN. Because SANs are networks, they are open and support all popular server operating systems, applications and storage systems. These IP SAN attributes, are continuous real-time data access even during component or system failure low scalability costs to maintain a consistent CAPEX over time and the ability to deliver high peak load performance to a large number of utility storage customers. Because IP SANs deliver these three key attributes in addition to the utility properties of iSCSI, they are becoming a popular network-storage solution for IT professionals seeking utility storage.

Performance

* A fast and highly reliable infrastructure where data resides away from the server

By delivering data storage capacity as a centralized utility you not only remove the data from the server and centralize it onto a network, but you can eliminate or greatly reduce the number of disk drives directly attached to workflow servers. Utility storage delivers:

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

* Agent- and license-free storage services to deliver different grades and levels of capacity for hundreds of individual and distributed servers.

show tremendous momentum in iSCSI. There are many IT professionals considering an iSCSI IP SAN as a means to finally deliver their utility storage services to large numbers of application servers. In 2003, worldwide iSCSI revenue amounted to $18 million. The market showed a 32 percent revenue growth over last quarter. In 2004 this soared to $113 million.

The latest quarterly storage numbers from International Data Corp.

For example, you can use a storage system with FC drives rated for 200 MB/sec and 10,000 IOPs for application servers requiring high performance, and use a SCSI storage system with ATA drives rated for 40MB/sec and 3000 IOPs for application servers requiring lower performance.

This allows the IT professional to select the storage systems that best fits the performance and reliability needs of varying application servers receiving utility storage. Utility storage, like electricity, needs to deliver the required data performance to the application server. This delivers raw random read/write performance that is from 4 to 15 times greater than small arrays and can easily support from 10 to 200 standard application servers. IP SANs can utilize any type of storage system. IP SANs are designed to sustain high levels of random read and write operations. Intelligent IP SAN switches have high-speed architectures utilizing network processors, real-time operating systems and powerful backplanes. A single IP SAN switch can sustain 300MB/sec or 600MB/sec (when clustered) of random read and write requests and well over 60,000 IOPs. After all, slow electricity would halt your appliances and slow data performance would halt your application servers.