Proven Fibre Channel SANs
Introduction
For nearly a decade storage area networks (SANs) have become mainstays for companies looking to increase storage utilization and manageability while reducing costs. SANs represent a topology for connecting storage assets directly to the network and establishing a peer-to-peer server/storage implementation. SANs have historically been based on Fibre Channel, but also incorporate iSCSI as a method of serverstorage communication. SANs solve multiple issues for enterprises with data centers to remote offices.
Fibre Channel SANs have proven to:
- Accelerate backup and restore
- Improve business continuance
- Boost high availability
- Foster storage consolidation
Accelerate Backup and Restore
As enterprise data becomes a much more valuable business asset, ensuring its stability and protection is more critical than ever. SANs can accelerate and simplify the data backup and restore process. SANs are ideal for backup-intensive environments, especially when there are clearly defined areas for isolating backup workloads. The switched 4Gb full duplex capabilities of Fibre Channel fabrics can significantly improve backup and restore performance. Moreover, Fibre Channel is designed to transport large blocks of data with great efficiency and reliability. Two popular SAN-based backup and restore approaches are typically referred to as the “LAN-free” and “server-free” backup and restore models.
Improve Business Continuance
Because SANs can integrate multiple storage devices and applications, they provide many high-availability options for organizations that need to support a wide range of business continuance activities in a costefficient manner. The distributed networked approach of SANs addresses the ability to recover data and quickly bring systems back online following a disaster. Without this level of protection even minutes of downtime can pose significant consequences to many types of organizations. To guard against downtime and to reduce business risk, a SAN solution would eliminate single points of failure, incorporate failover software, streamline data backup and recovery, and enable high-performance mirroring over great distances.
Boost High Availability
With the increase in the volume and criticality of corporate data and the importance of industry regulations, companies demand the highest possible system availability. Some of the key availability benefits of SANs include built-in redundancy, dynamic failover protection, and automatic I/O rerouting capabilities. Flexible connectivity options enable the development of SANs that have no single points of failure. SANs provide hot-plugging capabilities that enable organizations to install, configure, and bring storage online without experiencing server downtime. SANs can also support high-availability operations by enhancing clustering implementations.
Foster Storage Consolidation
There are many technical and business advantages to consolidating servers and storage with SANs. A SAN infrastructure enables any-to-any connectivity between heterogeneous server and storage systems. This allows much more efficient use of storage and server resources by consolidating widely distributed or underutilized resources into centrally managed environments and provides the following benefits:
- Increased storage utilization
- Decreased storage capital expenditures by enabling the purchase of storage on an “as-needed” basis
- Increased administrative staff productivity: manage more storage with fewer personnel
- Reduced application downtime and minimized business impact for storage upgrades
- Simplified storage management with centralized storage and server platforms
Summary
As the volume and criticality of data grow, companies need efficient, scalable solutions for making data available to servers, applications, and users across the enterprise. By providing a network of storage resources to servers, FC SANs uncouple storage from individual platforms, allowing data transfer among all nodes on the storage network. SANs offer a range of benefits such as improved backup and restore, enhanced business continuance, and simplified consolidation that address the needs of today’s data-intensive businesses.
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