SNIA IPS Forum Says iSCSI Standard is Ready for Prime Time

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The Storage Network Industry Association IP Storage Forum (SNIA IPS Forum) and its member companies today announced the Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) standard has reached a significant milestone with the completion of the IETF IPS Working Group’s last call.

According to the group, at this point, the standard is technically complete and accurate with only minor editorial comments remaining, and now IP Storage Forum member companies are poised to move forward in delivering rich new sets of storage networking products and solutions based on the final draft version of the standard.

“We are ready to rock and roll,” said Brice Clark, SNIA IP Storage Forum marketing chair. “IP Storage Forum members are busy getting the final versions of products that fully implement the new standard ready for interoperability testing and, of course, introduction and customer shipment.”

The SNIA IP Storage Forum expects its members to roll out an array of products that support the new standard by late fall 2002 or early 2003. While iSCSI has been featured as an emerging technology at several industry trade shows, iSCSI products will move into the mainstream demonstrations at the fall Storage Networking World conference in Orlando. Pre-standard products have been available for specific applications, however the stable standard signals a much more complete set of products for building robust storage networks on Ethernet and the ubiquitous TCP/IP infrastructure.

“The arrival of a technically complete and accurate draft of the iSCSI standard opens the road for the storage industry to embark on the next logical stage of developing networked storage based on iSCSI and Ethernet,” said Ahmad Zamer, chairman of the SNIA IP Storage Forum iSCSI Group. “Our members can now develop their IP storage solutions enabling the convergence of storage and networking using iSCSI as the magic ingredient of convergence.”

According to the SNIA, interoperability has been a key objective of the SNIA IP Storage Forum members since its formation in March of 2001. “The goal of all our members is to deliver robust products that plug-and-play to create easy-to-deploy storage networking solutions,” said Bill Lynn, SNIA IP Storage Forum co-chair.

The SNIA IP Storage Forum includes more than 50 member companies and was established to market and promote standards-based block storage networking solutions using IP networks including iSCSI, FCIP and iFCP.

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