Walker wasn’t as worried about the cost of gear as much as the expense of training his staff in FC technology. "The basic issue is that I don’t want to have to add another competency to my thinly spread staff," he says. "My people use IP every day, day in and day out. They know it. They love it."

Walker also doesn’t like the idea of buying in to a solution that would lock his department in to one vendor’s vision of a storage strategy. "In the education industry there’s a real phobia about building dependency on outsourced vendor relationships," he says. "With IP storage, we’re free to easily mix products from different vendors."

Faster, Farther, Safer

Reduced costs are only one side of the IP storage story. The technology also promises improvements in speed, geographic scope and even data security. On the speed front, IP storage’s current advantage is minimal. First-generation IP storage systems are designed to operate at speeds of up to 1.25Gbps?not much faster than FC, which maxes out around 1.06Gbps. But IP storage should get a push sometime next year, when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is expected to put its stamp of approval on a proposed 10Gbps Ethernet standard.

Perhaps even more impressive than IP storage’s potential for slashing costs and boosting speeds is its unlimited reach. While fibre channel technology limits its spans to about six miles, IP storage’s horizons are virtually unlimited, thanks to the Internet’s global scope. This means that an organization can arrange to have its data stored in another state, another country or another continent. "A global company can take advantage of storage space that’s available across the street or around the world," says Enterprise Storage Group’s Taneja.

Another big benefit of IP storage is that it usually requires little or no additional investment in security. Leading security technologies, such as firewalls and virus scanners, which most organizations already use to protect their Internet data transfers, can also be applied to safeguarding IP storage data. "You can view it as kind of a built-in protection," says Cisco’s Cree.

A Storage World Divided

While industry experts are virtually unified in their praise of IP storage as a concept, the field itself is divided into two camps, each supporting a protocol that’s incompatible with the other. The Internet small computer system interface (ISCSI) allows the transport of SCSI I/O traffic over standard IP networks, such as Gigabit Ethernet, and is designed to bring plug-and-play simplicity to networked storage devices. "It’s made of building blocks that people can deal with," says Paul Mattson, ISCSI business manager for IBM’s Raleigh, N.C.-based storage networking team. IBM, Cisco and Nortel are among ISCSI’s proponents.