The Internet FC protocol (IFCP), on the other hand, allows native fibre channel devices to be connected to an IP network. The IFCP protocol, supported by Lucent Technologies and several other companies, is designed to appeal to organizations that have an existing investment in FC technology.

While the flexibility of the ISCSI standard gives it the best long-term prospects, most experts view IFCP as the near-term winner. This is because IP storage switches and related products will allow organizations to extend their existing FC SANs across metropolitan area networks (MANs) and WANs without distance limitations. "IFCP lets you enter IP storage without junking everything you have," says Taneja.

Although choosing IFCP may be a no-brainer for an organization with an existing FC investment, the choice isn’t as obvious for CIOs just stepping in to the network storage market. Given the absence of a clear-cut standard, there’s always the chance of picking Beta over VHS and facing trouble down the road. "This may mean additional cost and even downtime in the future in order to upgrade the system," says Robert Passmore, a storage analyst at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.

Theoretical Wonderland

Despite the hoopla surrounding IP storage, many storage industry observers are skeptical that the technology can live up to its supporters’ extravagant cost-cutting and performance-boosting promises. With equipment just hitting the streets, real-world benchmarks haven’t yet been established, so vendors are free to live in a theoretical wonderland. "It’s hard to compare performance right now because it’s not the same, so it gets into an apples and oranges kind of thing," Passmore says.

Min Christopherson, IT director at DNA Sciences, a Fremont, Calif.-based genetics research company, hopes the IP storage system he started working on late last year will help him cut costs, but he isn’t sure just how much money he’ll save. "It’s not fair to crunch numbers right now, because there’s so much more to this technology than just the equipment cost," he says.

One of the extras IP storage gives its adopters is the headache of network latency?the time between initiating a request for data and the beginning of the actual transfer. High latency times can degrade performance to well below FC levels. But latency woes are solely a network problem, claims Wayne Lam, vice president of marketing for IP storage vendor FalconStor in Melville, N.Y. "If you have a well-designed network, latency isn’t an issue," he says. "You can’t blame IP storage for this."