Much confusion and discussion has accrued around the ease-of-installation and ease-of-use of Fibre Channel storage. Some technology professionals have decided it is too complicated and believe that deploying iSCSI storage over Ethernet would be simpler. Although Ethernet may be ubiquitous, most network administrators have little knowledge or experience managing storage. Basic storage management knowledge is needed to successfully manage storage, regardless of the interface to the storage.
QLogic Corporation commissioned Demartek to evaluate the ease-of-installation and ease-of-use of HP Simple SAN Connection Manager (SSCM) software that QLogic developed for HP as part of the HP StorageWorks H-series Fibre Channel switch portfolio. SSCM provides a simple, wizard-based procedure to configure and manage Fibre Channel SAN agent components, including host bus adapters, Fibre Channel switches, and storage arrays. SSCM allows a complete Fibre Channel SAN to be deployed in minutes.
In this report we compare deploying a Fibre Channel SAN with the SSCM software to deploying an iSCSI SAN in the traditional method.