Earlier this week, I received a message from Maggi Brown at Paralan Corporation mentioning family of Bridges to support parallel SCSI to iSCSI. I don't have any experience with this product. But if it works as proclaimed and reasonably priced, we can dust off our old parallel SCSI storage and tape devices and reuse them again.
As I wrote before (See WinTarget Alternative), I was very impressed with WinTarget that gave users capability to turn any Windows Server with excess internal storage in to an external storage array for other servers that need more storage. I believe this Paralan product falls in to similar category allowing the use of obsolete parallel SCSI external devices without the hassle of bulky cables hanging from the servers. Those cables were at the root of most problems in parallel SCSI world.
One potential application of this device may be with obsolete parallel SCSI disk storage in the area of storing personal non-business data of users.
Most IT practices recommend to discourage users from storing personal music and video files on network drives by active monitoring, notification and deletion of such files. I don't subscribe to such methodologies as I believe in human creativity that will figure out circumventing such measures, sooner or later. Instead, I believe in giving what users want and then managing storage of such data by delivering different levels of user experience through quality of service.
With Paralan bridge, the parallel SCSI storage devices can be installed at a central location. With file migration techniques, these obsolete devices can be used as primary storage for non-essential user data like music and videos.
This is just one of the many applications, I can think of, for this bridge product.
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