Technologies which constantly deliver improvements in performance, capacity, size, functionality and so on, are continuously developing. Many of these developments enable us to redefine the ways of doing things and go about our everyday business. The advent of Storage Area Network (SAN) is one such development, which can lead to a paradigm shift in the way we organize and use the IT infrastructure of an enterprise. SAN is a cutting edge technology that can provide solutions for most challenging business requirements. It can protect critical data and, at the same time, provide faster data access. This article discusses the evolution of SAN, its benefits and applications.
In today’s economy, everyone is creating
and consuming data. The rate at which data
is being created and consumed is increasing
exponentially day by day. It is not only IT
companies; you talk of any enterprise,
whether global or a start-up—all need
better storage solutions for strategic use of
information and addressing tremendous
growth of data creation and consumption.Distributed and client server systems have almost replaced mainframes. Now,
organizations all over the world have server-based systems in which external storage is
connected through SCSI technology and disk arrays are directly attached to their
dedicated host servers. The term given by IT administrators to such systems is
“host-attached” or “Direct-attached Storage” (DAS).
All organizations need support for a wide variety of operating systems, softwares
and other application packages on a wide variety of hardware platforms. In such systems,
it is difficult to manage independent storage. Thus, in a complex multi-operating
system, multi-application and multi-platform network, using heavy data intensive
applications such as multimedia; the traditional storage model is not quite as useful.
Reasons for this are that every storage device cannot be connected easily and
transparently. |
