Let’s say you have a incredibly well known photography studio for… say… dogs and as you take a lot more photographs you save them across a lot of hard drives, but your server is speedily operating out of physical space for extra really hard drives. While each NAS and SAN give remote access to storage devices by way of a network, the similarity ends there. All the storage that the mainframe demands was directly connected to it. Every thing was located and managed as a single, big entity. The capability to spread every little thing out over long distances makes a SAN quite useful to significant providers with several offices.
For instance, there are Windows applications that can be installed to nearby storage, but not to a network drive. The movement toward modular reference architectures as building blocks for significant data centers is now also trickling down to modest and medium-size enterprises as the vendors shrink their PODs into smaller sized scale podlets”. Despite such difficulties, SANs enable to enhance storage capacity utilization, since a number of servers consolidate their private storage space onto the disk arrays. On the LAN, servers use Ethernet ports on a network interface card (NIC) to connect to applications and customers.
A smarter data center that hosts IBM Storage solutions can supply an environment that is smarter, faster, greener, open, and effortless to manage. For little companies deciding whether it is time to take the step towards a SAN, the query is irrespective of whether the price of managing their storage infrastructure is increasing as quickly as their will need to add extra capacity.
For enterprises of all sizes, the next significant evolution is toward virtualization of server and storage infrastructure. Greater availability to storage by use of multiple access paths: A SAN makes it possible for for multiple physical connections to disks from a single or multiple servers. It’s having scary out there for the SAN people, as when anything is included in modular racks as portion of the POD, then the job of allocating and managing storage may fall to the server or network admins in the future. This is a storage mechanism that you are connecting to the network, typically with an ethernet connection.
For a a lot more total report on the economic characteristcis of SANs, please see our current study, Reassessing Storage Area Network Economics , which provides an evaluation of SAN adoption prices, return on investment experiences, and the total cost of ownership outcomes, primarily based on our survey of more than 200 data centers.
