Block: iSCSI

July 13, 2024

Ivan Ischenko

StarWind Pre-Sales Team Lead. Ivan has a deep knowledge of virtualization, strong background in storage technologies, and solution architecture.

Old but gold: The most widely used storage interconnect protocol, optimized for simplicity and broad compatibility.

Intro

Organizations are seeing an exponential increase in their storage usage, necessitating a storage system that performs well and is readily accessible by multiple virtual machines (VMs) and applications. Moreover, the storage must be highly available (HA) to ensure maximum uptime for critical applications. This is where iSCSI comes into the picture. It’s a block protocol that operates over a standard Ethernet network, making iSCSI implementation straightforward and platform-independent.

Problem:

Most applications and virtual machines (VMs) need block-level access to storage for optimal speed and functionality. Sure, you can address this by adding drives to the servers running the applications or VMs. However, every server has a limit on the number of drives that can be physically added, which the chassis can accommodate.

In the context of clustered environments, they need shared storage for optimal performance, and they also need to access it simultaneously. Moreover, this storage must be highly available to handle hardware failures, even at the storage layer.

There are various hardware options that can serve as shared storage, and Storage Area Network (SAN) is still popular today. When it comes to protocols, the most common protocol for SAN is Fibre Channel. However, building a Fibre Channel infrastructure introduces high CapEx and increases the overall complexity of the configuration.

Solution:

The Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) is a widely used and user-friendly block-level transport protocol that allows the SCSI protocol to be transmitted over a TCP/IP network. StarWind VSAN provides iSCSI storage to any industry-standard hypervisor or applications. It can use any type of underlying storage that clients need, whether it’s local disks or network-connected storage.

StarWind can also create Highly Available devices that can be shared using the iSCSI protocol. StarWind ensures that data is always replicated across multiple nodes, enhancing uptime and the ability to handle multiple hardware failures.

StarWind VSAN operates over iSCSI, which means all it needs is a standard Ethernet infrastructure to be implemented and start providing High Availability (HA) for your environment. As a result, StarWind VSAN is exceptionally easy to deploy and reduces integration costs, complexity, and maintenance.

Furthermore, StarWind’s iSCSI target offers performance close to that of the underlying storage, making it universally suitable for virtually any type of workload.

Conclusion:

iSCSI is a widely used block-level protocol due to its ease of use and minimal requirements for implementation. As a block-level protocol, iSCSI also delivers excellent performance. With StarWind VSAN, the process of creating and maintaining iSCSI targets becomes even simpler. Furthermore, StarWind VSAN can provide High Availability for iSCSI targets, making it an excellent choice for any use case, whether it’s a backup target, dedicated storage, or HCI clustered storage.