Anderson cites a recent engagement with a small bank. "This is a new bank in Savage, Minn.," he says. "Without iSCSI they would not have considered a SAN. But we just put in an EMC Clariion and two virtual servers. Right now they only have 800GB of data, but they are in good shape to grow, and there was almost no learning curve since it is all Ethernet based."

Anderson adds that virtualization was one of the drivers behind Chief Manufacturing's selection of an iSCSI SAN. "We did this about 18 months ago," he says. "We use iSCSI to mount local drives to Exchange and SQL Server."

Easing the pain

Virtualization is a key iSCSI selling point, but it's just one of several. As director of professional services for Intelenet Communications, a hosting firm, Jeff Stein is always searching for ways to streamline provisioning and maintenance. To that end, he started looking at iSCSI about three years ago. "We did not find it suitable for our managed server offering at the time," he says.

Fast-forward to today, and Stein is an iSCSI fan. "The technology got flatter, and prices dropped," he says. "iSCSI made it possible for us to go to a diskless managed server. Our OS and our customers' data now reside on the SAN, and we deliver about 1,000 servers via our iSCSI environment. We have cut our provisioning and response times by a factor of six going to an iSCSI SAN."