"ISCSI"s cheap. We can ship out a blade center, an [iSCSI storage] box and do all the configuration prior [to shipping]," said Ohme, who is using iSCSI switches and host bus adapters from QLogic Corp. in Aliso Viejo, Calif. Ohme also uses middleware from Sanbolic Inc. in Watertown, Mass., to create a shared file system across his IBM blade server infrastructure and 8TB of storage capacity on two network-attached storage arrays from BlueArch Corp. in San Jose.

Before the iSCSI implementation, Ohme said he"d had complexity issues with Fibre Channel -- especially with connecting multiple switches in a storage environment. "We were always sending someone down to the data center," he said.

Now Ohme is looking for backup technology at the SNW show that would allow him to perform multiple backups to a single site from his six remote data centers, possibly via a virtual tape library.

David Hussain, information systems director at Cardinal Health Systems Inc. in Muncie, Ind., said he has a three-phase mission: consolidate storage systems, find a data replication technology and develop a business continuity system. "I"m having a hard time getting to the first phase because of the cost. I may not get to replication because of that," he said.

Hussain said he hopes virtualization will help him consolidate his two SANs -- one made up of EMC Clariion arrays and the other of Hewlett-Packard Co. EVA arrays -- in order to reduce the cost and complexity of his back-end systems.

He said the hospital industry as a whole is "all over the place" when it comes to storage because it"s trying to digitize everything from patient records and radiology to billing. Hussain said he"s tired of being locked in to using only one storage vendor, especially when buying a half-dozen terabytes of storage from a company such as EMC Corp. can cost more than US$100,000. He wants to ease management issues and add less expensive disk systems into his SAN.