Members of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) IP Storage Forum will showcase new products and technology demonstrations at the Networld+Interop conference in Las Vegas next week, May 7-10.
The demonstrations will feature storage solutions that utilize the TCP and IP protocols that drive the Internet. The forum was formed in February this year to expand market awareness of IP storage and its benefits.
Consistent with the mission of the SNIA IP Storage Forum to market and promote standards-based block storage networking solutions using IP networks, forum members will demonstrate products and technologies at their respective booths. IP storage technologies that will be demonstrated include iSCSI, FCIP and iFCP. iSCSI — Internet SCSI or the common SCSI protocol over TCP/IP and Ethernet — enables native end-to-end storage solutions using Gigabit Ethernet for host to storage interconnect and extension into the larger IP-based Internet. FCIP — Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol — provides for the interconnection of existing Fibre Channel SANs over Internet distances. iFCP — Internet Fibre Channel Protocol — enables the interconnection of Fibre Channel devices over an IP network with or without and existing SAN.
IP storage technologies will allow new storage solutions that will take advantage of the pervasive use of the industry-standard Internet Protocol. Applications for IP storage include remote mirroring and backup, distributed Internet Data Centers, storage service provisioning and transparent LAN/MAN/WAN storage networks.