The SNIA ESF is announcing a new series of webcasts, following our hugely successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” webcasts. Those focussed on explaining storage technology from the ground up, and while they were pretty all encompassing in their storage technology coverage, they didn’t compare or contrast similar technologies that perform broadly similar functions. That’s what we’re going to do in our new “Great Debates” series, the first of which was “FC vs. iSCSI.” It’s now available on-demand. I encourage you to check it out. It’s a great debate with experts who really know their stuff. But wait… FC vs. iSCSI? That “versus” sounds more like an argument than a discussion. Was there a winner? Was this a technology fight, with a clear-cut winner and a loser? The answer is an emphatic “No!”

“It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it,” said Joubert, a French essayist who lived in the Napoleonic era. It’s a sentiment that all of us in the SNIA ESF agree with wholeheartedly. This series isn’t about winners and losers; it’s about providing essential compare and contrast information between similar technologies. Mostly we’ll not settle any arguments as to which is better – but we’ll have debated the arguments, pointed out advantages and disadvantages, and made the case for specific use cases. We’re not looking for winners and losers, and we think we succeeded in this first debate on FC vs. iSCSI. Here are some of the attendee comments we got on that webcast:

“Really nice and fair comparison …” “A good and frank discussion about the two technologies that don’t always need to compete!” “Very fair and balanced overview of the two protocols” Follow us on Twitter @SNIAESF to make sure you don’t miss announcements of our Great Debates series. To date, we’re planning: “Block vs File,” “File vs Object,” “RoCE, iWARP or iSER?” and more. If you have a debate suggestion, please let us know.