The ix2-200 will not win many awards for performance, but it is not short of features. Perhaps the most interesting of these, and one that is certainly unusual at this price point, is support for iSCSI.
Support for the iSCSI protocol allows the ix2-200, and similar low-cost devices, to give shared, block level data access to more than one computer.
Put simply, this means applications such as databases or Microsoft Exchange, which usually object to storing their data on a network-attached drive, can share a volume over Ethernet. With iSCSI support now built in to Windows, setting up a very basic SAN takes just a few minutes.
According to Paul Hudson, head of sales for Northern Europe at Buffalo Technology, another storage vendor, iSCSI is the key "enabling technology" for storage among small and mid-sized enterprises.
As iSCSI becomes more familiar to businesses, and their IT resellers, Hudson expects more and more companies to replace direct attached drives with small, or even not so small, SANs. Buffalo, for example, can put together an iSCSI system that provides a whopping 96TB of shared storage to a single server host.
Whether anyone can actually find key business information in storage systems that are that large, of course, is another question entirely
Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.
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