Frank Childs

This time around, I thought I would comment on a newer technology that is perhaps not so new after all.  It depends on how you look at it.  For a lot of our small business customers this is somewhat of a newer technology, while for others it has been around for well over a decade now.

To begin, here is a brief background to make sure we are all on the same page.  In the context of IT and networking, storage today generally refers to Storage Area Networks (SAN) or some other type of external storage system, not the storage or hard drives directly attached to your servers or individual computers.   The storage solutions of today are much more varied and much more affordable than the traditional SAN of the last decade or so.   By traditional SAN I am talking about the systems that use Fiber Channel technology with special Fiber cable and switches for networking and Fiber Channel hard disk drives.  If you think this technology provides the best performance out there, you’d be right.  However, the terms Fiber and “special” this and that are synonymous with money in unthinkable amounts in terms of cost.  This technology is generally left to large corporations and government enterprises to deploy since they are the only ones who can afford it.

The purpose of this article is to briefly discuss the evolution of SAN and storage technology as well as to determine why most small and medium size businesses can and should take advantage of the newer and much more affordable solutions on the market today.  A SAN is typically a network or a group of disk drive arrays installed in an appliance or shelf of some kind in a computer server rack.  A drive array would be two or more physical drives running as one logical disk.  For example, I could have two physical disk drives that are 500GB in size and mirror them; this would give me one drive array or one logical drive of 500GB of usable space.  Think of these drive arrays as nodes on the Storage Area Network.

As other technologies have evolved so has the SAN.  A prime example would be Ethernet networking that has matured over the years to provide very fast networking speeds of 1 GB per Second using very common and inexpensive Ethernet cable and switching gear.  We are now seeing the same thing starting to happen with 10 GB speed as well.  This speed of Ethernet networking has now gotten fast enough to support many different types of SAN solutions including those using standard hard drives.  As you may be able to guess at this point, SAN solutions are now very affordable. 

There are now many affordable options for businesses and organizations of all sizes to invest in this type of technology.  So why would you or another small business need some sort of a SAN solution?  Let’s briefly highlight some of the key benefits to a SAN storage solution.

First of all, it greatly simplifies the management of data growth.  Relentless data growth has become more and more a problem for many organizations and a cost effective SAN storage solution becomes mandatory.  SAN storage solutions also give you the ability to easily manage and share storage resources and applications between servers.  A really big deal is the ability to use these same storage solutions to deploy backup and disaster recovery programs and utilities such as replication to replicate your data between different sets of storage appliances and even between different physical locations that can be up to hundreds of miles apart.

The last big benefit I would like to mention is server virtualization.  This has been a big driver of the SAN storage industry for quite a few years now.  If you are virtualizing multiple servers then a SAN comes in real handy.  The more servers that are virtualized the more critical it is that there be shared storage resources available for each physical server.  In fact, in large data centers with many servers, multiple SAN appliances are deployed and different SAN appliances can even be mirrored across great distances.  In this example, the data on multiple drive arrays in one SAN appliance is being mirrored to another set of multiple drive arrays in a separate SAN appliance at a different location.

In conclusion, I hope you can see how powerful and cost effective these benefits can be when deploying affordable SAN solutions.  So what do I mean by affordable?  These SAN solutions can be as inexpensive as $3000.00 for about 6TB of space and up.  There are solutions available for less than that if you don’t need that much space but would still like to have shared storage and a good off site backup solution.

We hope that you will consider contacting us here at Integrity Solutions, Inc when you are ready to start taking advantage of this technology and the powerful benefits it can provide.  Please feel free to comment or let me know if you disagree with anything or if you feel that I overlooked something important.