IP SAN Director Suite

IP SANs can be made possible with the Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol, which serializes SCSI commands and converts them to TCP/IP (which uses Ethernet as its physical transmission medium) so data storage can be transported via the Internet.  iSCSI uses existing Ethernet switches, cables, routers, and other components, meaning it’s easy to implement and deployment costs are minimal. Storage networking over global distances is not a problem, as the Internet is so widely deployed, and millions of IT managers already understand both SCSI and TCP/IP technologies so there is a shorter learning curve. With the immediate availability of 10-Gigabit Ethernet adapters and switches, SANs push to higher performance levels than ever before.

Early deployments of iSCSI did not offer the high-quality transport and fault tolerance required by enterprise storage managers. However, SBE’s IP SAN Director Software solutions was one of the industry’s first to provide the full error recovery feature set required by enterprise storage managers, namely Error Recovery Level 2 (ERL2). Other key features available with the SBE IP SAN solution include: multi-pathing functionality, load balancing across multiple networking interface ports, and storage-independent architecture.