ViStor iSCSI Support

As well as supporting Fibre Channel, ViStor also supports standard IP networking hardware so you can leverage your existing infrastructure. For SAN like performance, you can use a Gigabit Ethernet network at a fraction of the cost of a Fibre Channel SAN network. This is done through the iSCSI protocol. Research Group IDC (IDC, 2006) estimates that iSCSI-based storage will continue to be the highest growth rate storage interconnect , and will constitute 30% of the SAN market by 2009. Its suitability for demanding storage system applications is already proven and accepted as fact.

iSCSI is a method of communicating SCSI over TCP/IP. Like any SCSI transaction, there needs to be an initiator and a target. The ViStor software behaves as a target, and the backup product is the initiator. For the backup product to behave as an initiator using iSCSI, there needs to be an iSCSI initiator driver on the backup server or the machine that is going to communicate directly to the VTL. The iSCSI drivers are available free of charge from most operating system vendors' websites, allowing you to implement a high performance iSCSI VTL backup with little capital investment.