S. Rosario

Advances in SAN Technology

Sverrir Rosario

4/24/07

Sverrir Rosario - Advances in SAN Technology

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Main Topics

Definition of a Storage Area Network (SAN) Traditional SAN Extension SAN Internetworking Intelligent Switches Supporting Storage

Virtualization Intelligent Switches Supporting

Replication / CDP Application


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Definition of a SAN

A SAN is a dedicated network with high transfer rates.

A SAN provides infrastructure for building redundant, high-availability storage for groups of servers.

A SAN is a way to connect servers or clusters of servers to pools of data storage devices.

A SAN can connect over greater distances than are practical with conventional storage technologies.


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Traditional SAN Extension

Traditional SAN extension builds a single Fibre Channel fabric between two remote locations called an E_Port.

When connecting SANs together, two switches could have the same domain name so a principal switch must be selected to oversee the allocation of unique blocks of addresses to each switch.

Without the principal switch selection process duplicate addressing could occur resulting in the misrouting of data.

During the principal switch selection procedure, if a switch has to be renamed then each end device connected to the switch must re-login to the fabric to acquire new network addresses.


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Traditional SAN Extension


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SAN Internetworking

SAN internetworking is based on the Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) and IP storage switches, which can eliminate fabric reconfiguration issues.

SAN internetworking provides interoperable E_Port connectivity to each local SAN fabric, but it terminates the E_Port connection at each site.

Now, each site remains a separate SAN and only authorized connections between storage devices and servers are allowed across the IP network.

This ensures that disruptions at one site will be isolated and not propagated to other locations


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SAN Internetworking


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Intelligent Switches Supporting Storage Virtualization The main difference between an intelligent switch and a standard

switch is the intelligent switch’s ability to perform deep packet inspections and its ability to perform specific operations on the packets passing though it.

When intelligent switches are not used any I/O from the host to the virtual storage will have to be handled by the Storage Virtualization Application running on a dedicated server, which translates the virtual address to a physical storage address before sending it to the respective storage application and thus overloading the server.

When the intelligent switch is used, the address translation and associated work can now be done by the intelligent switch.

This provides performance improvements and also makes the architecture more scalable.


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Intelligent Switches Supporting Storage Virtualization


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Intelligent Switches Supporting Replication / CDP Application Efficient storage utilization, business continuity, and

disaster recovery capabilities of an enterprise are addressed by deploying replication and continuous data protection (CDP) applications.

When used in combination with the replication applications, intelligent switches can improve the performance of data replication and eliminate the need for replication agents on individual hosts.

An intelligent switch replicates all write-I/Os, and a copy is sent to the CDP appliance and thus the host no longer requires a specific CDP agent, reducing the overall complexity of implementing a CDP solution.


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Intelligent Switches Supporting Replication / CDP Application


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Advances in SAN Technology

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S. Rosario

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