The iSCSI protocol has become popular in recent years with companies that want to consolidate the backup of Wintel servers farms without having to use expensive Fibre Channel networks. The iSCSI protocol allows storage administrators to back up those inexpensive servers over the LAN. The most significant savings from iSCSI come from being able to use SCSI network interface cards instead of Fibre Channel host bus adapters.

Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. predicts that iSCSI will be used to connect more than 1.5 million servers to SANs by 2007, nearly twice the number of systems it expects to be connected via Fibre Channel. Despite iSCSI's growing popularity, it won't likely kill off Fibre Channel demand anytime soon, since network speeds are still a quarter that of Fibre Channel's 4Gbit/sec. throughput.