Storage Solutions

Storage Solutions by Manufacturer:

Consolidate your storage with a Storage Area Network. A storage area network (SAN) is architecture to attach remote computer storage devices to servers in a way that, to the operating system, the devices appear as locally attached.

A SAN is thus a dedicated storage network that carries I/O traffic only between servers and storage devices it does not carry any application traffic, which eliminates the bottlenecks associated with using a single network fabric for all applications. A SAN can also enable direct storage-to-storage interconnectivity, and lends itself to the exploitation of new breeds of clustering technology and to getting the best out of Network Attached Storage devices that can intelligently provide disk and tape capabilities to one or more servers.

The benefits of sharing storage, usually simplifies storage administration, and adds flexibility since cables and storage devices do not have to be physically moved to move storage from one server to another.

Other benefits include the ability to allow servers to boot from the SAN itself. This allows for a quick and easy replacement of faulty servers since the SAN can be reconfigured so that a replacement server can use the LUN of the faulty server. This process can take as little as half an hour and is a relatively new idea being pioneered in newer data centers.

Storage Area Networks allow for:
  • Fast backup speeds that match the allotted backup window without adversely affecting network band-width.
  • Flexibility to connect and share remote devices and servers. • Improved scalability to expand the storage infrastructure without rebuilding.
  • Interoperability between disparate systems.
  • Centralized management to lower the overall total cost of ownership.
Here is a comparison between Ultra Wide SCSI and Fibre Channel SAN:

Storing and managing data in a cost and time effective way is becoming one of the most difficult duties of IS. Most storage currently resides in a Direct Attach Storage (DAS) model meaning that the data is physically attached to a single server’s backplane.

Common problems of this model are:
  • Availability-if that server goes down, your users cannot access the data
  • Severe underutilization of total disk resources. On average, the DAS customer is only using 40% of their disks while other servers are starving for more storage.
  • Inability to scale management with the growth of data. Today, the average administrator can manage 1.2Tb but by 2004 the same admin is expected to manage 12Tb.
  • Servers are purchased to increase performance and storage capacity. Today, storage represents 50% of the server price Backing up multiple servers across the LAN affects users or exceeds your back-up window.
Let Abtech help you plan and deploy a consolidated storage environment with best in class hardware from StorageTek, LSI Logic, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.