Good resource on IP storage   October 15, 2003

Needs an update & objectivity   September 10, 2003

But this book is already out of date. Most of the comparisons made between FC and IP are inaccurate (no mention of 2 Gb FC, necessity of IP HBAs) or avoid serious corporate considerations like technology availability, maturity, and cost. I hate to say it, but large portions of this book read like a product brochure (Mr. Clark is Director of Tech Marketing for Nishan Systems and he plugs them & iFCP often). If you're looking to understand IP SANs and where they will fit in your environment, This isn't it. An update may help, but it would probably be better if this book got to the brass tacks of IP SANs and avoided FC comparisons. One last point: backups aren't low priority (streaming media doesn't like intermittent data flow & data protection is high priority).


Very good for engineers!   August 21, 2002
  2 out of 4 found this review helpful

Clear explanation about the RAID, SCSI, FC and IP relations. Very good book. I found it very helpful.


A good vendor-neutral, technology-neutral book   June 26, 2002
  2 out of 2 found this review helpful

While it purports to be about iSCSI, the book does such a good job of explaining the history of the technologies that lead up to iSCSI (SANs, Fibre Channel, etc.) that I feel confident recommending the book to people that are network geeks that want to learn what all this SAN and Fiber Channel stuff is about, and also want to learn about all this new iSCSI, iFCP and FCIP too.

It doesn't go into vendor-specific information, it is _not_ a book about how to run a SAN or how to pick vendors. It is about the technology in general, how it works, what it does, and what it can't do.

Someone that deals with SANs all day might read it and say, "Yeah, but I know all that already. I want to know what products work with what equipment, etc." People just getting involved in the technology, on the other hand, really need this book.

I highly recommend it.


Worth a read!   January 15, 2002
  9 out of 11 found this review helpful

This is a really good book on the new area of Storage Area Networking using IP network technology. It starts with a background on SAN and Fibre Channel (FC), then gets into why IP SAN products are coming onto the market, and how they compare to the older FC products. It also covers SCSI, and has several chapters on IP, UDP and TCP, including how they apply to SANs. A large part of the book is devoted to the various protocols and approaches being used to support SANs over IP, including Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP), Metro Fibre Channel Protocol (mFCP), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI). There are also chapters on security and QoS.

This book could be used by either a "storage head" or a "net head", as it has chapters to bring the reader up to speed in both storage and networking technology. Best of all, it is written in a very accessible, readable style that entirely avoids the dry textbook style some tech authors fall into. While the intro claims the book was written for IT personnel in various capacities, it would also be useful to development engineers and marketing types trying to come up to speed on the parts of IP SANs they are not familiar with.

Highly recommended.