High costs have kept some business-technology managers from adopting storage networks. StoneFly Networks Inc. hopes its low-cost IP-based storage technology will change that.

StoneFly this week will introduce a device called the Storage Concentrator i3000, which takes information in via the iSCSI protocol, converts blocks of data into a form that won't choke an IP network, and spits it out via Fibre Channel for storage area networks or SCSI for direct-attached storage.

The i3000 promises high-speed performance and uses StoneFly Replicator mirroring software to let users copy data locally or remotely, synchronously or asynchronously, across Ethernet for long-distance backup and recovery. Available later this month, a standalone i3000 will be priced at $13,995, and a FailOver Cluster pair configuration will go for $19,995.

Until now, the cost for a high-speed Fibre Channel port has been about four times the cost of an IP port. "With the i3000, people could reach out to servers now that they couldn't before because of the expense," says John Webster, an analyst at Data Mobility Group. "It could remove the cost [issue] from the growth of storage networks."