For brand new SAN implementations iSCSI appears to be the likely as well as the superior choice for most IT managers.  Although there are some technical advantages with Fibre Channel in most cases these appear unlikely to justify the higher costs of Fibre Channel compared to iSCSI.

Security issues with iSCSI are largely unjustified due to misunderstandings about the architecture.  Contrary to some suggestions,  iSCSI does not carry most of the types of security risks associated with remotely hosted and remotely accessed internet applications.

Also, iSCSI in many cases offers comparable performance to Fibre Channel because the performance “bottlenecks” in most applications are not data transfer speeds - rather the bottlenecks are disk I/O issues.      Thus even though the Fibre Channel speeds are theoretically about four times faster than iSCSI, applications will often be constrained by the disk i/o speeds and will not benefit from Fibre Channel’s theoretical bandwidth advantage.

Another factor in “betting on” iSCSI’s future is that Hybrid implementations are possible such that companies can migrate from FC to iSCSI gradually and without disruptions or risks.

Although some IT managers may stick to their guns and continue with theoretically faster but much more expensive Fibre Channel configurations structures, over time it seems that iSCSI will “win” and - at least for the short term - become the dominant approach until other SAN methods bring a superior price/performance ratio.