Deploying a SAN to Centralize Storage Across the Enterprise @ VIRTUALIZATION JOURNAL

Deploying a SAN to Centralize Storage Across the Enterprise

Fighting the cost and complexity of storage

Sep. 18, 2005 08:15 AM

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Large enterprises have adopted SANs for these reasons, but smaller enterprises and departmental IT organizations have waited to move to SAN-based storage because of their concerns about SAN cost and the skills required. But several factors are now falling into place to make SANs a viable option for smaller enterprises and departmental units with limited IT resources.

Cost-effective SAN Bundles - The cost of the switches and host bus adapters (HBAs) required to build a SAN have been dropping and vendors have been creating bundled solutions specifically geared to smaller SAN implementations.
Advances in Disk Technologies - SATA disk drives are becoming more and more common in storage arrays, increasing in capacity (400GB today) and incorporating more enterprise-class features in next-generation releases. SATA drives offer significant cost savings over high-performance Fibre Channel drives. In addition, systems designed with a SAS midplane can support both SATA and higher-performing, more reliable Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. For example, an array could be configured with six SAS drives partitioned in one storage pool or LUN and assigned to a server with a transaction-intensive application such as a reservation system, and the other six drives in the array could be SATA and partitioned in a storage pool or LUN and assigned to a different server running a reference application such as medical imaging. This flexibility isn't possible with Fibre Channel and Parallel SCSI subsystems and provides customers with the best of both worlds.
Evolving Management Standards - As the industry moves to management standards such as the Storage Networking Industry Association's Storage Management Initiative Specification (SNIA SMI-S) and Microsoft's Virtual Disk Service (VDS), tools are evolving to simplify the management of SAN environments. With a SAN in place, organizations can consolidate the storage existing on multiple storage devices on to a few larger devices shared by many servers.

In summary, to achieve the benefits of a SAN, organizations need:

Tested and validated SAN configurations that are easy to install
Scalability to address growing storage requirements
Simplified management of both systems and components
Flexible solutions that can be tuned for specific markets and applications

The benefits of a SAN far outweigh the alternatives, and as their cost drops and complexity lessens with advances in technology, SAN adoption in the SMB market will increase.

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About Michael McNamara
Mike McNamara is manager of product marketing at Adaptec, a provider of end-to-end storage solutions. He has over 16 years of marketing experience in the computer industry, with over 10 years in the storage industry. Mike graduated from Fairfield University, Fairfield CT with a Bachelor's degree in Business Management, and holds an MBA from Clark University's Graduate School of Management, Worcester, MA.