As companies grow, so do their
requirements for technology. As they
outgrow servers and disk space, they must look for the best alternatives to assist
their growth with the least disruption to
their current business.
According to Richard Florence, director
of professional services for Orange
County-based Agile360, “The utilization of
storage area networks (SANs) is becoming
the solution of choice for many growing
companies. A SAN combines the IT structures already in place with what is needed
to accommodate current and future
growth in a way that optimizes the entire
IT operation.
Smart Business talked with Florence
about the benefits of SANs.
What is a SAN?
A storage area network is essentially a
separate computer network that connects
storage devices to a heterogeneous set of
servers on a many-to-many basis. SANs are
typically comprised of network switches,
disk arrays and some form of physical
interconnect, such as fibre channel, SCSI
or iSCSI.
What is the primary reason that a company
might begin to look at using a SAN?
The main reason most companies introduce a SAN into their IT environment is
that SANs provide IT managers the ability
to manage their universal storage requirements from a central platform. When an IT
organization purchases a server, the
amount of disk space available for any
application running on that server is limited by the size of the server and the size of
hard disks available to that model of server. In many cases, disk space intensive
servers, such as databases and file servers,
face unpredictable growth due to company
mergers or other changes in the business.
As a result, the company must purchase a
new server with greater storage capabilities once the available disk space of that
server is exhausted. Often, the other computing resources on the server, such as
memory and processors, are still capable of fulfilling their intended purpose. In the
case of SANs, an increase in disk space
requirements of an individual server can be
addressed by simply adding additional
hard disks to the SAN.
How else can the use of SANs enhance IT
functions?
SANs can provide advanced functionality
that usually isn’t available on servers without the use of third-party applications.
Features such as data replication, mirroring and snapshots provide higher reliability
to an organization’s critical data. Another
popular advanced feature is the ability to
move data across different levels of tiered
storage based on factors such as frequency
of use and file types. For example, there
may be an accounting spreadsheet stored
on a file server that has not been accessed
in more than year. That spreadsheet would
be automatically moved into a lower-performance, lower-cost disk array within the
SAN infrastructure to ensure that the maximum amount of space is available for frequently accessed files on the portion of the
SAN containing the faster, more expensive
disk drives. Features such as this ensure
that companies maximize their investment
in storage.
What are some of the key considerations in
the evaluation of a SAN?
Some of the critical elements of the SAN
buying decision are high availability, performance and software capabilities. Since
a SAN acts as a central data storage facility
for multiple servers, it becomes a single
point of failure for many of a company’s
core business files and applications, so
high availability of the SAN becomes the
most critical concern in its selection.
Features such as multipathing, which provides multiple data paths from the SAN to
a server, and the use of multiple switching
fabrics help to ensure reliability.
The performance capability of a SAN
should also be examined using a ‘best-fit’
approach, whereby the speed and performance of the SAN should match its intended
purpose. For example, a SAN that will be
used to provide data storage for an e-mail
archive system does not require the performance levels guaranteed by a fibre-channel, SCSI disk-based SAN. For that
application, a SATA disk-based SAN usually meets the performance requirements
and would be a less expensive solution.
One must also look at the range of software available for use with the SAN to provide advanced features, such as data replication, mirroring and tiered storage functionality.
Are SANs suitable for small- to mediumsized businesses?
Yes, there has recently been a major push
to create relatively affordable SAN solutions to accommodate the small- to medium-sized business. By utilizing newer technologies, such as SATA-based drives and
iSCSI connectivity, some manufacturers
have been able to offer SAN solutions in
the sub-$10,000 price range. Many SAN
manufacturers have also started to simplify the management of SANs to enable IT
administration generalists to manage their
environments without specialized training.
RICHARD FLORENCE is the director of professional services at
Agile360. Reach him at [email protected] or (949)
278-9532.