Over the last few years the open systems portion of ENTER_NAME_HERE's Data Center has shown tremendous growth, in both the number of applications supported, and the amount of servers required to support the additional demands. In order to efficiently support our current environment, and be positioned for future growth, deploying a SAN (Storage Area Network) is necessary. A SAN is a high-speed network that joins together storage systems and servers utilizing a fiber backbone with switches and hubs. Once deployed, SANs operate as a utility making additional storage accessible to resource and application servers as needed, routing data to servers on demand, and routing data from disk to tape servers for archiving. A SAN is an alternative to traditional server-attached storage. High-performance SANs utilize fiber optic network connections routed by a switch, often dedicated to guarantee quality of service. Additionally, storage can be managed more efficiently, allocating additional storage requirements on-demand, instead of dedicating "stranded storage" to particular servers, thus the ability to consolidate storage pools. Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It can help dramatically reduce the high maintenance cost of proliferated storage, more fully utilize storage assets, and improve the quality of storage services that Distributed Technology offers to the enterprise. .
Migrating to consolidated storage architecture will allow Distributed Technologies to provision more storage for less cost. Efficient and flexible storage systems have a direct impact on key business indicators. Consolidated storage systems reduce indirect costs, which are well known to be onerous in IT infrastructure investments. These systems are designed to provide the availability and scalability that keep enterprise business systems up and running through periods of growth and retreat. Additionally, besides storage consolidation, some other direct benefits derived from this architecture are better backup and recovery, higher availability, faster scalability, propriety data sharing, low management costs, and cross platform storage management.
