It looks like an IP vs SCSI war broke out and ended before we even knew anything was askew.
Byte and Switch: What is your opinion regarding the battle among different storage transport protocols -- that is, the competition among FC, iSCSI, InfiniBand, etc.? Do you see one protocol winning the market? If so, which? Or, do you think they will coexist within the same SANs?
Mark Lewis: We think that they will coexist, that there are needs. If you look at the setup, we definitely see Fibre Channel SANs lasting for a long, long time, due to its focus on storage protocols, acceptance in the market, and how robust they are today. We see good product needs for iSCSI in wide-area connectivity, and extending the SAN into new areas -- and potentially even using it for low-end SANs as well, where you don't need the bandwidth.
InfiniBand will come along. I'm not sure how needed it will be as a storage interconnect. But the interesting thing that I see is they talk about different protocols, but it is really everyone else acquiescing to the storage protocol we know as SCSI. So, it is really running SCSI over Fibre Channel, or running SCSI over IP. People say, "I need to get some IP-based storage." But, no, you really don't. You're going to get SCSI-based storage that happens to have an IP chip on it, or a GigE chip. To the people building hardware, software, and arrays, it is still SCSI. We're happy as a clam that Cisco Systems Inc. acquiesced to using SCSI. It was really an IP-versus-SCSI war, and they had to layer SCSI on top of it because they were going to lose.
Byte and Switch: Do you see a particular time frame for the dust storm settling itself out?
Lewis: I was on a panel yesterday, and I heard both extremes. Gartner was saying that iSCSI will really be here in 2004, potentially 2005, while Cisco is saying "ready for prime time in Q3" of this year. Obviously, Cisco has a lot more bet on iSCSI than Gartner. While I think that Gartner may be a tad conservative, I think they may be closer to right than Cisco. My expectation is that iSCSI will have some limited market applications, particularly in the area of data replication, initially. It will be the latter part of next year at least before we start to see any significant traction in that area. Then 2003, 2004, where products start to get real traction in that area. You can use history to predict the future. I remember in 1995 and 96 when I heard all of these same things about Fibre Channel, but it took us three or four more years to really get momentum in the marketplace, all the standards set out, and all the pieces together.....
byteandswitch.com
Here's a background story on how Larry Boucher developed the Scuzzy interface at Shugart Associates (Seagate) and at Adaptec. He recently resigned from the Adaptec BOD to focus on Alacritech.
....Before SCSI was invented to provide a hardware interface for connecting devices to computers, companies were forced to build their own interfaces.......
......Every new disk drive seemed to generate a new standard. SCSI (originally SASI for Shugart Associates System Interface) was designed to solve these problems and allow future drives to be quickly integrated into already shipping systems....
......The first name proposed for the interface was SASI, for Shugart Associates Storage Interface. I thought that would be a great name for our interface-Shugart Associates System Interface.....
......During this timeframe a few Shugart engineers left to join the recently founded Quantum. While Shugart's primary business was still floppy disks, the hard disk business was beginning to show signs of being a real success. Shugart Marketing did not view the Quantum competition kindly. When I proposed that we should be selling controllers to customers regardless of whose disk drive they were buying, I was summarily shot down. I felt strongly enough about it that I built a business plan to try to convince Shugart Marketing and Finance that there was real value in building a stand-alone controller business. When this too was turned down, I left to start Adaptec.
Shugart continued to do well with the interface, and soon NCR joined to help take the SASI interface to ANSI to bless it as a standard.........
.....The Unix companies for some time felt that they could derive value from building their own disk controllers. For their servers they used IPI drive interface disks, and for their desktops they used the ST506 interface. Converting them to SCSI was a slow process, but fortunately happened soon enough that SCSI chip sets were able to keep Adaptec going when IDE interface, devised by Conner Peripherals and Compaq, destroyed the PC disk controller business. This was a bleak time for Adaptec. Fortunately, we came up with the concept of the SCSI host adapter. This was at the same time Novell, who was getting out of the hardware business, needed the performance of SCSI in their server software. This pretty much completed the process of moving SCSI to a drive level interface.....
.....it became apparent that a high-speed serial interface was needed to replace parallel SCSI as a channel interface. By now the logical SCSI interface had been thoroughly integrated into all of the popular operating systems, so when Fibre Channel was designed, it made use of the SCSI architecture. While the designers may prefer to not recognize it, Fibre Channel is serial SCSI. Due to the combination of the Fibre Channel architecture not being forward or backward compatible, and the amazing continuation of the performance and functionality of the parallel SCSI interface, Fibre Channel has been slow to replace parallel SCSI. Because of the incredible forward and backward compatibility of Ethernet and the advent of the Alacritech hardware TCP/IP protocol processor, iSCSI may finally replace parallel SCSI as the channel interface of choice. Then again, I'd have made that bet more than ten years ago, but the engineers working on parallel SCSI have proven me wrong again and again........
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