In the past, many organisations have provided more servers or direct-attached storage (DAS) to tackle the issue of growth of data. When weighing up the credentials of a storage server such as DAS, it should be remembered that it creates pockets of storage which leads to an under-usage of resources and needs to be controlled using various different interfaces.
However, there are alternative storage servers out there. A committed storage solution that connects servers and storage via SAN (storage area network) is known to simplify administration and facilitate a better supply operation. The majority of larger companies have conventionally installed Fiber Channel SANs for their high performance characteristics. However, these necessitate a specific network, which adds to cost. This has then encouraged the appearance of iSCSI storage.
In a iSCSI storage network, the transmissions between a server application and the physical hard disk drive is carried through a TCP/IP Ethernet network, which is the same network technology that is used by the majority of businesses in the present day. iSCSI gives small and medium businesses the opportunity to deploy SAN technology that was previously labeled as impossible. It now allows large organisations to produce balancing storage levels for secondary servers or increase their existing networked storage to include other departments. It facilitates the consolidation of storage space for an enlarged capability and operation. The facility of moving virtual machines freely between physical servers is critical to attain high availability and disaster recovery resources.
iSCSI storage can assist in frequent concerns encountered in virtualisation, like the ability to manage relationships between virtual machines and storage, data protection and storage management, and virtual machine mobility.
Storage should be considered an essential constituent rather than an accessory to your IT system. Even the best-designed computer environments can grind to a halt if servers and storage resources have not been tested for compatibility.