What Is iSCSI and Why Should I Use It?

iSCSI is considered an open secret of optimizing business storage and expanding your server capacity at a lower cost, without needing specialized hardware or staff.

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iSCSI is comparable as a much lower-cost alternative to expensive Fibre Channel systems. iSCSI offers many benefits to storage expansion, such as affordability with reduced storage costs, simple deployment that allows you to use your existing hardware, easy management with no need for specialized equipment or staff, and flexibility in how to expand your storage based on your usage.

iSCSI is widely supported by all major operating systems and hypervisors, and this universality lets your business to build a secure and flexible storage network at lower costs by allowing a wide variety of server hardware across the same network. The compatibility with virtualization enables virtual machine solutions for increased availability and versatile backup and restore options. iSCSI offers tremendous value to SMB as it allows you to consolidate and maximize your storage while streamlining hardware and lowering your total costs.

With iSCSI you can:

- Fully utilize the storage capacity of NAS storage devices on the network
- Simply and seamlessly expand storage capacity to scale with your business growth
- Deploy a flexible storage and backup solution that lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Add an extra layer of security to your storage network
- Use existing networking equipment without needing to learn or upgrade to Fibre SAN topology

One of the key benefits of deploying an iSCSI-SAN is streamlining your network. Because iSCSI protocols work over Ethernet, an iSCSI-SAN can disregard the distance barrier between the storage system and the application system. This eliminates any physical limitations of your network, increasing work efficiency. You can also seamlessly link remote sites to your centralized data repository, and mirror data storage across geographically dispersed locations, enabling more efficient remote work as well.

Since the TeraStation 5010 NAS allows you to quickly increase storage without needing to consider physical storage configuration, you can enjoy faster deployment on new servers, and scale your storage as your business grows as you see fit.

Lowering Your Costs
One of the reasons why iSCSI is widely popular is the significant cost savings. IT managers with limited budgets often have to do more with less. Unlike Fibre Channel, iSCSI does not require any specialized IT knowledge, and utilizes same standardized, inexpensive Ethernet equipment. This saves you the need to look into specialized hardware, as well as additional personnel to manage and troubleshoot your storage network.

iSCSI also allows you to add storage on the fly when needed – connecting a RAID-backed iSCSI storage server will allow you to add terabytes of storage to the existing physical server without actually having to add physical drives. This means that even if the TeraStation NAS no longer has spare bays for additional drives, you can still quickly and seamlessly expand your storage without having to reconfigure your network, saving you time and money.