The move to iSCSI did raise questions, notes Kory Kitowski, the bank’s vice president of IT. For example, engineers from Microsoft and other vendors weren’t familiar with iSCSI, so they questioned unfamiliar server and SAN settings when installing or troubleshooting their own products. Internally, despite having IP-savvy IT staff, the bank still needed to reeducate the storage administrators. “We went through a major paradigm shift,” Kitowski says.

But the result was a 30 percent overall savings to what they had expected to spend using traditional SANs, Peterson says.

Even within large enterprises, there’s no longer a need to rely solely on fibre channel, says ChoicePoint’s Garrison, who uses either iSCSI or fibre channel, based on the specific storage’s availability needs.

Prepare for the Next Wave
As enterprises get these structural changes in place, both Simpson and Buchanan advise that, for further savings, CIOs should begin looking at two emerging technologies: network storage virtualization and single-instance storage. Network storage virtualization moves management out of the arrays and other disk hardware, and implements it as part of the SAN’s operating environment. This lets IT treat all the disks as a virtual resource pool.

Single-instance saves on storage by keeping just one copy of data in your frontline systems (such as application servers), substituting pointers to the source for any copies, while the related deduplication technology saves just one copy of a file or data block during backup or archiving and substitutes pointers for any later copies found. Long available for e-mail servers, single-instance technology is becoming available as a feature both in backup and archival systems and in frontline storage systems, notes Burton Group’s Simpson.

But several factors limit these technologies’ adoption, says Gary Fox, national practice director for the consultancy Dimension Data.

Fox says that network storage virtualization technology proves complex to manage, despite vendors’ characterization of it as plug-and-play.

As for single-instance storage technology, data loss worries surround the pointer approach; most companies are in pilot mode for it, Fox says. Also, the technology comes primarily from startup vendors, though Fox expects that to change. Still, despite its nascency, “We see a lot of interest from clients,” he says. After all, they also foresee continued unbridled storage growth.

Galen Gruman is a frequent contributor to CIO. You can reach him at ggruman@zangogroup.com.