According to Dell, the market leader in iSCSI SANs, it's even healthier than that. According to IDC, the iSCSI SAN market grew 40.6% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2009. Dell led that market with 29.2% revenue share, HP with 18.5%. And Dell's EqualLogic iSCSI product line -- Dell iSCSI SAN vendor EqualLogic in 2007 -- grew 44% in that period.

For the full year 2009, spending on iSCSI storage gear was $1.9 billion, according to IDC, growing to $4.4 billion in 2013 -- a compounded annual rate of 23.4%. Users spent $9.2 billion on FibreChannel/FCoE/Inifinibad gear in 2009, and that will grow to $11.1 billion by 2013 -- a CAGR of less than 5%, according to IDC.

Meanwhile, Dell says it recently commissioned Forrester Research to conduct a survey of the storage and unified fabric plans of 213 companies. According to Dell, the survey found that two-thirds of respondents are moving toward a unified fabric in one to three years; and of those with awareness or knowledge of unified fabric, 56% believe iSCSI is best suited while 27% believe FCoE is best suited.

Regarding storage purchases in the next 12 months, 10GbE and iSCSI arrays are the top two selections, Dell found in its survey. Among all survey respondents, 45% planned to purchase 10GbE switching or related components, while 39% planned to purchase iSCSI arrays.

Dell is encouraged by these findings and its position in the iSCSI market as customers consider converged data center fabrics."If you're looking to make a unified fabric decision today, you're looking at iSCSI, which has been around for … years now," says Travis Vigil, senior manager, Dell, who is responsible for the EqualLogic iSCSI storage portfolio. "There's years of testing and validation, real-world customer deployments behind it, and it allows you to unify your fabric at 1Gbps and 10Gbps. So it gives you more flexibility than what you may be able to realize with other technologies."