The EMC SAN worked well, and the company never had a problem with it, but it had far more features than the company needed, and once the service contract expired it would have been extremely expensive to renew. Also, since the sale price didn't cover expansion, any growth in the system would have been prohibitively expensive as well. For that reason, the EMC system has remained at its original 3 TB installed size.

In preparation for that transition, the center has installed an iSCSI-based system from StorMagic.

The company was already leaning strongly toward iSCSI when StorMagic showed their system. It had begun looking at Microsoft Initiator about 24 months earlier. String Bean Software had developed an iSCSI target that worked with Windows, and experimented enough with that to be convinced it was worth pursuing. The company liked iSCSI because it offered the functionality that was needed and seemed a lot less complicated than Fibre Channel. StorMagic allows taking a new server and adding iSCSI storage volume in a couple of minutes and a few mouse clicks.