SAN SOLUTIONS: Managing Storage Effectively

With companies going global, there is an enormous need for compiling and
managing huge amounts of information. As a result, a new breed of enterprises
has evolved, commonly termed as e-businesses. Channel partners have realized the power the Internet has to help them
conduct business successfully and have fully exploited it.

However, operating in an e-business environment has its own inter-related
challenges. This is in terms of designing a storage system for storing the vast
amount of data and information that is critical to companies.

CUSTOMER-CENTRIC STORAGE SYSTEMS

Storage systems should be designed so as to meet the current and future
needs of an organization. In such a scenario, scalability is the core issue that
needs to be addressed. Industry analysts like IDC and Forrester have predicted a
continual growth of 50% per year in storage requirements.

However, today’s legacy architectures are unmanageable and non-standard due
to the dispersed nature of storage devices. Therefore, the key strategy for
storage is that it should be networked. According to Forrester, networking
storage architectures will reduce a firm’s storage expenses by 28%, over a
period of five years.

Apart from this, a well-developed information infrastructure for
information-centric organizations is needed. Partners must offer customers open
choices in networked storage solutions like storage area networks (SAN), network
attached storage (NAS) or combinations of both to meet their application and
information needs.

HOW BENEFICIAL IS SAN?

It is important that the channel highlights the benefits of implementing a
SAN system. These are scalable networks based on fiber channels protocols that
support high-speed data transfers between servers and storage. It means that in a SAN, the high-speed networking allows storage to be shared
and pooled, rather than be attached to each server directly.

However, in-order to benefit totally from a SAN solution, customers should be
offered an open choice, scalability, centralized resources, data management,
superior security, high availability and heterogeneous connectivity among
others.

This is possible if a partner bases the solution on a switched-network SAN
architecture, which allows users to scale to much higher data capacity.

WORKING OF A SWITCHED FABRIC SAN

Partners may be in doubt as to how the SAN’s switched fabric works to
deliver the required scalability? Fiber channel switching architecture enables
multiple 100 mbps, non-blocking path connections. As more ports are added to the
switch, the aggregate bandwidth automatically increases, as each path delivers
100 mbps speed.

TRENDS IN STORAGE
	Gartner estimates the total Indian storage market at Rs 2,000 crore in 2003; SAN will account for 49% while NAS has 32% of storage revenue in India by 2005
	Need for disaster management solutions will drive storage market
	According to Forrester, networking storage architectures will reduce a firm’s storage expenses by 28%, over a period of five years

At the same time, switched fabric SANs place new demands on storage devices
as they permit many more hosts to access any given storage port. As the number
of users increases, the input/output rates also increase drastically and the
access patterns get more dispersed. This can result in overload of the internal
share buses of traditional storage systems.

Such a situation will slow down the access times for users. Therefore,
solution providers will need to implement an internal switched fabric design
that delivers multiple, redundant, non-blocking paths between storage ports,
multiple cache nodes and multiple disk array control processors. Intelligence
should also be embedded into the SAN solution.

STORAGE MANAGEMENT, A CRITICAL ISSUE

Besides addressing the scalability needs of an organization, management of
the storage resources is another critical area. Initially, it was a hands-on
effort for partners, as industry standards for storage products were
unavailable.

A multiple vendor storage system made it difficult for the various elements
the system to talk to each other. This restricted exchange of information about
the data they contained. This made monitoring of the storage system from a
central point impossible. Therefore, partners must be careful that the SAN system has an open
architecture, which can be monitored centrally. This will happen only if the SAN
solution supports other SAN components of various vendors.

SERVICE FOR SAN SYSTEMS

Some analysts point out that about 70% of the large enterprises back up only
selective data due to the lack of resources for full back ups. It is because
maintaining the entire storage system is a very expensive proposition. For an information storage system, companies must have a good technical staff
and storage infrastructure. This requires outsourcing their information storage
needs to storage service providers (SSPs).

SSPs rent data storage on a per-user basis so that customers do not have to
buy and manage their own facilities. Users will get a fast link to their stored
data and online tools they need to manage it. When storage needs increase, the SSP can quickly add new capacity. This must
be the outlook of a hosted environment and the Internet plays a very powerful
tool in this regard. Therefore, SSPs will need storage solutions that offer them
the required scalability as well as and enables them to configure and manage
storage for their users.

The bottomline is that partners must offer a SAN solution that allows
scalability, manageability, performance and availability so that customers get
their return-on-investment. Partners will need to examine operational tasks that
can be automated and leveraged across servers and multi-vendor storage hardware.

PP
Subramanian is the Country Manager India, Hitachi Data Systems