No other approach to storage offers the impressive capabilities and benefits of SANs. Provided below is some basic information designed to help you understand how SANs will play a role in your IT environment.

What are SANs?

In its simplest terms, a storage area network (SANs) is an information infrastructure dedicated entirely to providing storage and storage management capabilities for an enterprise. It typically connects one or more systems from one or more vendors to storage devices and subsystems.

Why SANs?

Because SANs are dedicated entirely to storage and use fast Fibre Channel interconnect technology, they deliver levels of performance, speed, and flexibility that are simply unavailable from previous-generation approaches. The results are most apparent in five key areas - improved sharing, consolidation, accessibility, management, and protection of enterprise computing resources. The bottom line: SANs ensure better access to business information that can improve corporate productivity, competitive advantage, and market share.

What SANs deliver

SANs couldn't have chosen a better time to revolutionize storage technology. The rapid growth in the number of Internet-enabled businesses, plus a constantly growing reliance on information technology means that today, more than ever before, companies need fast and reliable ways to store, retrieve, and manage massive amounts of data ... exactly what SANs deliver. In fact, SANs have proven their ability to provide:

  • 10% to 20% increase in overall storage utilization rate
  • 33% to 67% reduction in tape drives required
  • 100% to 650% increase in storage management productivity
  • 100% increase in servers having access to remote mirrors and online backups
  • Significant Savings on Investment (SOI)
  • Should you consider migrating to SAN technology?

There are specific business conditions that make migrating to SANs technology logical, if not imperative.
These include:

  • Becoming an Internet-enabled business through the implementation of eCommerce or other Web-based initiatives.
    Fast, highly reliable and flexible storage is essential to accommodate business that turns at
    ever-increasing "Internet speeds."

  • Increased reliance on enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, etc. Here again, highly reliable
    storage, coupled with the spectrum of data recovery and protection mechanisms offered by SANs, is critical.

  • The evolution of standard applications, such as e-mail, into business-critical applications. Storage reliability
    plus fast data recovery are vital to maintaining these business-critical applications.

In addition, any enterprise looking to sharpen its competitive edge by providing faster, more reliable, more comprehensive, and more flexible access to information should explore SAN technology.

What's the best way to migrate to SAN technology?

SANs offer many benefits today, and promise to offer even greater benefits in the future. You can create and evolve your SANs as your business needs require. You can further extend SANs functionality and value as new SANs technologies and products become available. The addition of even a few SANs elements/approaches/ technologies will deliver measurable benefits, so there's no reason to wait to start enjoying the benefits of SANs technology. What to look for in a SAN solution

A SANs is made up of three major component areas:

  1. Fibre Channel Infrastructure technology that creates the rich SANs fabric
  2. Storage systems on which data is stored and protected
  3. Storage and SANs management software that delivers unified, automated management throughout the SANs.

The ideal SANs should certainly incorporate the best of the current products and technologies in each area. But since SANs are still evolving, it's also essential to look at which vendor provides the best overall SANs vision, plus the best framework for transforming that vision into a reality.

The overall excellence of the SANs depends greatly on how well the areas interrelate to create a total solution. You should examine which vendors have the best track records in creating total solutions, making them work, and providing on-going support to guarantee the availability required by your business. Most businesses are implementing a SANs because of its high availability characteristics. The vendor you select must be:

  • Committed to Open SANs technology through an announced and established strategy
  • Capable of ensuring nonstop performance through a program of expert, responsive service and support

A look ahead

While today's SANs benefits are impressive, tomorrow's promise to be even more spectacular. SANs are positioned to evolve rapidly in the next 12 - 24 months. Over that period, they will create a true "storage utility" that will make the concept of ubiquitously accessing virtual storage a reality. Based on an Open SANs approach, the "utility" will deliver two unprecedented capabilities:

  1. "Any-to-any" connectivity, allowing the connectivity of heterogeneous systems with different operating
    systems to storage products from multiple vendors.
  2. The ability to deliver data to anyone, anytime, anywhere.