Storage Area Network Information Center

• Pressure to grow while cutting costs
• Difficulty managing islands of servers and storage
• Inefficient utilization of storage resources
• Costly unplanned system outages
• Slow backups which cause heavy LAN congestion
• Increasing demand for a disaster recovery plan

LEARN HOW SANS PROVIDE KEY BUSINESS SOLUTIONS

SANs have proven to be excellent solutions to the most challenging problems facing IT managers. These solutions include:

Backup and Restore
The high-performance, large-block transport of Fibre Channel SANs makes them ideal for backup and recovery. SANs remove backup and recovery traffic from the LAN, reducing LAN congestion, dramatically decreasing backup windows, and more effectively utilizing storage resources.

Business Continuance
SANs offer a wide variety of cost-effective ways to keep your business running, including eliminating single points of failure, incorporating failover software, streamlining data backup and recovery, as well as enabling high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting, and mirroring at distant data centers for disaster recovery.

High Availability
Built-in redundancy, dynamic failover protection (N+1), automatic traffic rerouting capabilities, and clustering are some of the key features that help SANs meet high-availability demands placed by service-level agreements, industry regulations, and other business needs.

Server and Storage Consolidation
SANs enable centralized pooling of storage devices, making them available for sharing by servers across the SAN. This increases storage utilization, reduces need to purchase servers for the sake of obtaining storage, allows for non-disruptive storage additions, is more cost effective to manage, and typically reduces service contract costs.

FIND THE RIGHT SAN SOLUTION

The upcoming steps in the Evaluation Phase of the SAN Info Center will help you learn more about the basics of SANs, the return on investment (ROI) they offer, as well as how SANs compare to alternate technologies.

Previous: Evaluate SANs
Next: Learn the Basics of SANs