286 SAN Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
10.1.2 Lease expiration
At the end of 2004, University ZYX realized that the four-year lease on the ESS
and the 1 Gbps Fibre Channel switches was only six months away from full term.
They began planning for replacements.
As part of this, they wanted to leverage iSCSI to provide a flexible, low-cost
connection to a range of small servers. They also wanted to use their existing
campus IP backbone to provide some sharing capability with the School of
Engineering, which was approximately 2 km down the road. Engineering wanted
to purchase their own disk system as well.
At the time, the Cisco MDS was the only Fibre Channel solution with FCIP and
iSCSI being offered by IBM. Because the ...