The State of SAN

Steve TerrillManager of Systems ArchitectureInterstate National Insurance

Key Trends

External storage becoming SAN storage

FC becoming the incumbent interconnect technology

System integrators remaining a primary SAN channel

Data replication use increasing in B/R & DR

Staff and skills shortages

Emphasis on ease of deployment and management

Key Trends

Pre-SAN Post-SAN

SNMP

Fragmented Storage View

Unified View

Internal

DAS

SAN Value to the Open System Environments

Storage consolidation

Better backup and recovery

Higher availability

Better scalability

Proprietary data sharing

Lower TCO Long-Term

Storage resource pooling

Standardized data sharing

The Current State of SANs

Hardware infrastructure is in ready state

• PCI to Fibre Channel HBAs

• Fibre Channel directors, switches and hubs

• Fibre Channel to host RAID controllers

• Robust storage enclosures

SAN management software evolving to vendor

definitions

• Competing MIB/API standards

• Vendor-defined storage/volume sharing

• Heterogeneous SAN management software is unlikely in

near future

Making the business Case

Making the business case to move to a

centralized storage scheme may not

necessarily be an easy one to make for

some organizations. • Often times businesses are more concerned with the

initial hard dollar cost, than the aggregate potential

savings.

• TCO

• ROI

• Must Look at all savings, hard and soft

What Strategies?

The key strategies necessary to achieve the best use of a centralized storage solution.1. Data Management strategy

2. Charge Back Strategy

3. Server Consolidation

4. Data Priority strategy

5. Disaster Recovery Strategy

With the combination of these strategies the savings in long term hard dollars, short and long term soft dollars and lower administration costs will surpass the initial hard dollar expenditure.

Pros and Cons?Pros:

Reduced Administration

Scalability

Centralized backups

Lower backup administration costs

Reduced backup windows

Open Systems Architecture

Better disaster recovery options

Easily expandable

Reduced response times

Faster data access

Cons:

Significant initial investment (basically pre-buying storage)

Learning curve

Difficult to manage without appropriate strategies

No standardization across vendors

Minimal skilled resources available

Summary

SAN Technology could ultimately benefit

many businesses with the capability to

easily manage and scale their storage.

Potentially reducing the overall IT costs

spent on additional storage and servers,

while improving the level and speed of

service to the business.