The Fundamentals of a Well Built SAN

WHITE PAPER
The Fundamentals of a Well-Built SAN
®The SAN/iQ platform from LeftHand Networks is better by design, delivering iSCSI SANs that are extremely scalable, reliable, highly available, and high performance. This white paper discusses the technology behind the LeftHand SAN/iQ advantage."
INTRODUCTIONCarefully protecting and managing the storage that holds a company's data has become In ESG's view, one of the most important missions of today's Information Technology (IT) organizations. LeftHand is an With data being a company's most valuable asset, many are turning to Storage Area Networks (SANs) as a way to meet a number of challenges:excellent true . Central data storage and management helps to eliminate the risk that direct-attached clustered storage storage represents to an organization. Direct-attached storage creates islands that are "system that dispersed across the datacenter and are difficult to manage. Direct-attached storage tends to utilize fewer of the reliability techniques (such as RAID) that are the norm in embodies the SANs.
benefits of low . An increasing number of government regulations dictate how financial, customer, and personnel, health-related information is stored, maintained, and retained. Centrally complexity, greater managing storage through SANs helps IT organizations to ensure their compliance with optimization, a growing maze of requirements.. The global marketplace knows no downtime, and disaster-recovery capabilities are no utilization, and longer a luxury, they're a necessity. SANs help organizations to address the need for simplification remote replication in an efficient, organized, manner, rather than in the haphazard, application-by-application way that direct-attached storage requires.of storage. . The larger the amount of data that an organization must manage, the longer the -Tony Asaro downtime window can be for performing backups. Snapshots, a feature of most SANs, Senior Analyst allow IT organizations to close this window by making an instantaneous copy of live Enterprise Strategy Group volumes for consistent, complete backups.. Server virtualization has enabled IT organizations to treat their server infrastructure as a single shared pool of resources that can be used to host and scale applications at a moment's notice. Storage area networks can provide a corresponding flexibility in storage, allowing IT organizations to decouple the scaling of servers from storage, and allowing them to draw on a pool of storage that can be shared by the entire server infrastructure.
Traditional Fibre Channel SANsOrganizations with traditional Fibre Channel-based SANs know how they can be complex, costly, and difficult to manage. Indeed, most IT organizations that have installed traditional SANs have planned and purchased their storage hardware years ahead of the need. This is a costly proposition that is amplified by the fact that ever-plummeting storage costs make this a "buy high, sell low" proposition. IT organizations also have found that the initial cost of a SAN deployment usually includes professional services engagements with their storage vendor.
IT organizations with installed Fibre Channel SANs are also aware of a number of other issues. The fact that the cost of a pair of redundant Fibre Channel Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs) can approach the cost of a small server limits IT organizations in their ability to use central storage everywhere, thus cutting their implementation short of their vision.
The cost of SAN infrastructure can well exceed the cost of the storage itself. Purpose-built SAN hardware, from Fibre Channel switches to storage controllers, tends to be expensive due to the low number of units produced and the specialized components they contain. Those who have scaled their Fibre Channel SANs know that the traditional model of a
[  ] www.lefthandnetworks.comhardware RAID controller connected to multiple disk trays has its LeftHand Networks delivers the SAN features that Fibre Channel limits: as the number of disk trays increases, the controller itself SAN customers expect, but the similarity ends there. The purpose becomes a bottleneck, requiring the purchase of more complete of this white paper is to describe the SAN/iQ storage software storage systems. And as the 2-4 Gbps Fibre Channel throughput is platform and how its architecture contributes to it being more eclipsed by off... [download for more]