SAN: Storage Area Network
What is a SAN?
A storage area network (SAN) is the most efficient way of consolidating storage for your servers. The underpinnings are a high-speed, special-purpose network or a separate sub-network. SANs support disk mirroring, backup and restore, archival and retrieval of data, data migration from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among different servers in a network. The traffic on this storage network is more efficient than traffic on a corporate network. There's no Web browsing on the storage network, just fast, efficient data transfers.
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What to remember about a SAN
- SAN gives every server access.
- SAN provides a "virtual" direct attachment between all servers and all storage devices on the SAN.
- SAN allows centralized information management and allocation of storage to servers.
- SAN offers more efficient network traffic management.
What will a SAN do for your company?
SANs represent more than a technology choice. They are a strategic business direction that will help you save money and out-plan your competition by gaining control over the IT variables that matter most.
- Control costs: Why buy more servers when all you really need is disk space? Unlike older direct attached topologies, SANs separate capacity from processing power allowing you to scale storage or servers independently at exactly the right time.
- Control resource utilization: DAS (direct attached storage) limits storage to individual servers. SANs let you create centralized storage pools, maximizing the return on every disk and tape investment. No more wasted capacity - get more value from what you already own!
- Control availability: SANs help eliminate downtime for critical applications such as e-mail. Flexible SAN topologies provide as much resilience as you need.
- Control everything…globally, automatically: Why configure storage on a server-by-server basis? SAN management tools provide a single intelligent dashboard from which all resources can be allocated and monitored, and from which daily tasks such as backup can be easily automated.
Do you need a SAN?
Choose a SAN if you need a solution that offers the following:
- A way to consolidate your server storage: Managing multiple servers used for storage begins to become more unmanageable as your server numbers increase thus raising your management costs.
- Scalability: Storage capacity can be easily added to a properly configured SAN as storage needs grow without any disruption to your business.
- High availability: A SAN eliminates most downtime for upgrades and service. Since the disks aren't "directly attached," you can add storage devices to your SAN and allocate storage without powering down your server.
- ROI on your storage purchases: Direct attached storage (DAS) environments typically have low storage utilization (30-60%). Storage deployed on a SAN typically has higher than 80% utilization.
- Backups completed on time: A SAN can reduce backup time by 80% or more over DAS or network backup. Also, SANs enable backups to be consolidated into tape libraries.
- Increased storage capacity without adding new servers: By attaching storage to servers through a SAN, the server capacity is no longer limited by the number of available I/O (PCI) slots or power. Up to 16 million devices can be connected to a single server through a SAN.
- Flexibility to add/remove storage without interrupting applications: A SAN typically allows you to add, remove and allocate storage, as well as integrate new technology, without disrupting ongoing data center operations.
- Easy data management: A SAN enables data to be consolidated and managed under common interfaces, not scattered about on multiple servers. Also, a SAN is the underlying technology of Storage Virtualization.
- Viable disaster recovery (DR) or business continuance (BC) process: With a SAN, DR procedures are easier and more cost-efficient to implement. Off-site BC storage can be managed through a SAN at much greater distances than locally attached storage.
- Corrupted data recovery: Snapshots allow you to create multiple points
of recovery.
Types of SAN Connections
Historically SANs have been connected on a Fibre Channel network and were very expensive so only the largest organizations could afford them. Today Fibre Channel is less expensive, putting it within reach of more businesses.
Newer to the market is a SAN that connects using iSCSI. This SAN allows SCSI protocol to run over IP so you don't need to learn a new technology. iSCSI SANs make it possible for more organizations to be able to utilize a SAN. IDC forecasts
a $2.65 billion market for iSCSI SANs by 2009.
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