Okay Mario, you asked the question, so I’ll attempt to respond. Do you need 10G plumbing for your storage? Yes, there are certainly immediate opportunities to deploy 10-GbE networking connectivity as part of iSCSI solutions. The big question of course is where can you justify the investment today – early in the declining price-point curve? One answer is Bandwidth Aggregation to the iSCSI target server. Let’s look at this from the perspective of how one provides sufficient bandwidth for iSCSI solutions today – multiple 1-GbE links. Let’s say you’re an organization that has 6-8 average servers each connected via 1-GbE (pretty normal). If you add an iSCSI target server into the mix to provision storage to all these servers (for all the right reasons) a single 1-GbE connection to that iSCSI Server is probably going to be over-subscribed. The solution – multiple 1-GbE links in the iSCSI server – 2,3,4 – whatever your capacity planning indicates. You configure the iSCSI traffic across these connections – perhaps dedicating one to the Exchange Server because it’s a heavy user – putting the 3 low-activity servers across another – etc. This approach works – but it’s a more involved planning and configuration process – and it’s something you have to optimize over time as server loads evolve. And, what if you have more servers and more load you need to support? At some point the complexity and overhead of the multiple 1-GbE NIC model becomes a problem. We’ve demonstrated that our iSCSI target, WinTarget(TM), can process the kind of bandwidth available on a 10-GbE link. You can see those results here. Assuming your iSCSI target server has the disk subsystem horsepower to keep up with that level of traffic (controllers, disks, etc), how do you take advantage of that per-server capacity? Can you put enough 1-GbE NICs into that server to fully take advantage of the available services? Take the same situation and apply 10-GbE connectivity. You deploy a 1-GbE / 10-GbE aggregation switch – say something like the ProCurve 3400cl, that provides 24 ports of 1-GbE and 2 10-GbE ports. That switch retails for around $10K (using optics, not the newer CX-4 copper 10-GbE connectivity, which will be less expensive). Install a single Neterion Xframe 10-GbE card in the WinTarget iSCSI Server and let the switch aggregate the 1-GbE server traffic through that single link. For fail-over, perhaps you put two 10-GbE Xframe cards in the WinTarget Server. Granted, those cards are about $4K each today, but the prices are coming down quickly – and when the CX-4 interface cards are available (and switches) – the cost will drop considerably.So what would that get you? How about 7.5TB of storage available for either NAS or iSCSI services for somewhere in the neighborhood of $30K-$31K (street price, with two 10-GbE cards) – and 24 1-GbE ports to access it. With the availability of CX-4 interfaces – that price could quickly be For a company that has made the decision to upgrade their infrastructure with SAN capabilities – I’d argue that this is potentially a very attractive alternative to FC. Obviously individual circumstances will decide whether a 10-GbE investment is warranted – but there are certainly situations where adding this to the mix will make an iSCSI SAN solution an attractive option.