So Morgan bought SANMelody software from DataCore that is hardware-agnostic. "For about $60,000, I got two brand-new, dual-core Dell 1950s to be my new app servers. Then I was able to load SANMelody onto the best two of my old servers to create my SAN."

Hanging SATA drive cages off the converted SAN boxes gave him six terabytes of storage. "I am licensed for 16 terabytes with DataCore," Morgan says. "With LeftHand, for the same amount of money, I would have been stuck at two four-terabyte nodes without my new app server boxes."

He bought the hardware and software and did prototyping last summer, so when VMware announced support for iSCSI in September, he was ready. "We got it all running in December, and, finally, my server is completely decoupled from the hardware."

Clearly, Morgan is excited by the power of combining server virtualization with SAN technology. "If I had virtual servers and no SAN, it would be easy to back up and restore the server on another machine if, for example, I needed to do maintenance. But this still takes time and probably means taking some applications offline. When you add the SAN, you can do the same thing with no interruption of service."

Consultants such as Jamie Anderson, president of Emergent Networks, a consultancy and VAR in Minneapolis, are finding the combination of iSCSI and virtualization is enough to convince hesitant clients to make the leap to shared storage.