Pyx Thin Clients to Support iSCSI

To help overcome performance and accessibility limitations hampering the adoption of iSCSI technology, Pyx Technologies Inc. is expanding its thin-client support of the protocol deep into wireless and personal computing environments.

Pyx, of Concord, Calif., is set to announce that its iSCSI Initiator and Target storage management software have been embedded into a 240KB thin client. The thin client has been tested to operate on Hewlett-Packard Co.s iPaq H5555 and H3675 handheld devices.

The Initiators slim size enables the iSCSI offering to support a wide variety of other wireless handheld and common devices including Pocket PCs, UPC (Universal Product Code) scanners, security cameras and home gaming consoles such as Sony Corp.s PlayStation, for example, said Pyx officials.

Because early iSCSI application deployments have been prone to multiple on-demand failures and process errors, Pyx has built its Target storage management software to feature iSCSI ERL2 (Error Recovery Level 2). This provides the highest-possible degree of block-level data transmission reliability over IP networks by users to any data store on any iSCSI-enabled target over any wireless network, LAN or wireless transport.

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According to a recent report by Gartner Inc., of Stamford, Conn., iSCSI initiators will be an important alternative to Fibre Channel HBAs (host bus adapters) as the link between the host server and the storage network. Gartner predicts that 1.4 million servers featuring iSCSI initiators in 2008 attached to IP SANs (storage area networks) or to Fibre Channel SANs by means of bridge products will be nearly 50 percent greater than the number of Fibre Channel SAN-attached servers.

Carl Munio, vice president of engineering for SBE Inc., of San Ramon, Calif., said Pyxs thin-client iSCSI Initiator is significantly reducing the “enormous” administration and security burden of fabric in Fibre Channel.

“Its nice to be able to access several terabytes back at a co-location somewhere and receive all that data from a simple handheld device,” said Munio.

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