Since the approval of the protocol, iSCSI has been steadily gaining acceptance among end users and storage vendors.

In the end, these projects need to be planned with the storage vendor, the server vendor, and the network vendor all involved.

There are very few storage vendors that offer direct infiniband connections to storage, for one thing.

To be honest it's different type of storage than what is offered from the traditional storage vendors.

As for the future, it is clear that most storage vendors are lining up behind fibre channel over Ethernet.

It is typically a proprietary solution, not compatible between various storage vendors.

This differs from the snapshots provided by some other storage vendors in which every block of storage has to be copied, which can take many hours.

NetApp, like most storage vendors, increases overall system performance by parallelizing disk writes to many different spindles (disk drives).

But he works at a network-attached storage vendor, Network Appliance.

Storage technologies continue to advance both functionally and economically, and storage vendors compete aggressively against each other.