iSCSI vs FCoE

Has anyone had experience with either of these? I'm working with some vendors to design and implement a new rack setup with new SANS and both vendors seem torn for which direction they want to go in. I can't seem to find a clearly defined difference online aside from the actual way they are implemented.

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Comments

RobertKaucher

I have some experience with iSCSI. I suppose what it really comes down to is what will the SAN be used for? I have very little knowledge of FC in general. HAve you looked at Using SANS and NAS? Might be helpful.

Amazon.com: Using SANs and NAS (9780596001537): W. Curtis Preston: Books

NightShade03

I'll check out the book thanks.

Basically we have two sites one in NY and one in GA. Each site has a blade center with 4 blades and a VMware infrastructure built on top of it with SAP running. These blade centers will need to tie into SANS which are local to each location. Vendor A wants to use iSCSI and Vendor B wants FCoE

RobertKaucher

FCoE - or iSCSI? - Feature - Techworld.com

HeroPsycho

My understanding is FCoE has less overhead, but iSCSI within itself has better security, etc.

But I'll be honest, I don't know enough about the subject to have an informed opinion.

Claymoore

RobertKaucher wrote: »

I have some experience with iSCSI. I suppose what it really comes down to is what will the SAN be used for? I have very little knowledge of FC in general. HAve you looked at Using SANS and NAS? Might be helpful.

Amazon.com: Using SANs and NAS (9780596001537): W. Curtis Preston: Books

Don't bother with that book unless you want to learn SAN backup methods. I read it and iSCSI is only covered in one paragraph in the appendix. If you want to learn iSCSI, I recommend this book Amazon.com: iSCSI: The Universal Storage Connection (0785342784190): John L. Hufferd: Books

If you want to compare iSCSI vs FC vs FCoE, you might try this book from Cisco Press. Storage Networking Protocol Fundamentals

Personally I would choose iSCSI due to prior experiences, even though not all of that experience was good. Plus if you need to create a pass-thru disk in Hyper-V that is only possible with iSCSI, not FC (and thus, I assume, FC over Ethernet).

sidsanders

if you are buying san devices, iscsi would seem to have the lower cost. fcoe has fc device requirements, and iscsi you could deploy on a number of plats and take advantage of existing gear.

we use wintarget (before msft ate them), falconstor, IET on dell gear with several TB's of raid disk for an esx cluster, solaris/aix/windows/linux hosts as well. we got veritas dbacor (oracle rac) to use a falconstor target for shared disk as well. we may take a look at the hds fcoe options though the cost to get into the hds door was many times greater than using iscsi (we have a uspvm).

for sure i have seen more iscsi offerings than fcoe, so things may be changing on the cost front...

tenrou

I'm not familiar with FCoE but I know I like iSCSI. The thing you need to watch is that it can be badly implimented and that will really hurt you. I've used Falconstor, Freenas, Windows Unified Storage Server and Nexanta.

I rate Nexanta and WUSS pretty highy. Freenas worked but was flakey and Falconstor is money for a poor product.

The one thing you want with iSCSI is bandwidth because it's going over you local LAN so if you can get LACP etherchannel on the server thats running it then it will make a huge difference.

Nexanta offers you the ability to use thin provisioning on your iSCSI LUNs as well which is pretty impressive. I've not used it in a production enviroment so I don't know if it's going to suffer the same issues I have with freenas where targets would just disappear.