Another View of the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI Protocol War

Sunday December 30, 2007 • Leave a Comment 

Jon Toigo at Enterprise Systems has posted his predictions for storage in 2008. He has an excellent alternative view of the fibre channel vs. iSCSI protocol battle. Despite the fact that I recently panned iSCSI, Jon raises interesting and valid points about fibre channel’s shortcomings, especially in the area of interoperability.

“Unlike FC switches, where standards have been developed to ensure that vendors can make their switches non-interoperable with one another even if they fully comply with the letter of ANSI standards, iSCSI switches (or rather IP switches) will work and play together.”

I, personally, as well as several of my customers, have been bitten by SAN interoperability issues. I’ve even griped on occasion that FC SANs should be as easy to assemble as IP networks. I just hadn’t extended that thought to iSCSI. Thanks, Jon, for opening my eyes to this one.

Interoperability issues aside, I still see fibre channel remaining the dominant storage connection protocol in 2008. Perhaps 2009 will finally be the year of iSCSI.