With more and more business processes and citizen services operating over the net, demand for protection of data has risen with efficient backup and recovery solutions. Thus there is a need to set up a strategic storage infrastructure that facilitates high availability, quick scalability, efficient management & optimized utilization of resources.
Traditional server attached storage commonly known as Direct Attached Storage (DAS), due to its inherent limitations finds it difficult to fulfill above requirements of the storage infrastructure. Therefore many organizations/ data centres are embracing a networked storage infrastructure known as Storage Area Network.
The Basics
Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed special-purpose network that interconnects different data storage devices with associated servers and other computing devices. Typically, a storage area network is a part of the overall network of computing resources in a data centre. SANs support disk mirroring, backup, restore, archival and retrieval of archived data, data migration from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among different servers in a network.
SANs are built up from variety of hardware components. RAID Storage systems, switches, Servers, backup devices, Interface cards and cabling all come together to form a SAN. Devices in the SAN are connected by a high speed, high capacity network. Currently, fibre channel is the most popular technology for SAN implementation because of its high speed, non-blocking architecture, its ability to scale from 133 Mbps to 1 Gbps and beyond, and its flexibility to allow many different high level protocols to operate over its infrastructure.
SAN Management Software
Generally referred in terms of hardware, SANs often include specialized software for their management, monitoring and configuration. In today’s multi-vendor and hardware-diverse SAN environments, this management software is often proprietary or tied to certain products and vendors. While this is beginning to change, it still means that SAN management software must be selected with great care, and consideration given to the SAN equipment manufacturers, OS platforms, firmware revisions, HBA drivers and client applications.
The Benefits
High Availability
SANs are designed to facilitate a high availability environment that can help prevent (and better tolerate) system outages to reduce the risk of downtime. One of the most common ways SANs support high-availability operations is by enhancing server clustering implementations, which are typically used to ensure that applications continue to run in the event of a host server failure.
Enhanced Backup & Recovery Solutions
One of the most valuable time and cost saving features of a SAN architecture is its ability to offload backup operations from a LAN and/or backup servers, thereby increasing the amount of LAN bandwidth available to end users. Serverless backup extends these performance gains by removing more than 90 percent of the backup administration overhead that is usually placed on a server as backups are performed. This is achieved by incorporating some of the backup intelligence into the data storage or connectivity peripherals themselves. This can significantly free up backup servers by releasing them from large portions of a backup operation’s administration and data moving chores. Thus SAN based backup solutions enable the administrators to optimize network and server utilization.
Efficient Utilization of Resources through Consolidation
Traditional server-attached storage is often difficult to update or centrally manage. Each server must be shut down to physically add and configure new storage. In contrast. SANs provide a way to add storage without the downtime and disruption associated with server-attached storage upgrades. Moreover, the same number of administrators can typically manage much larger amounts of SAN-based storage, often three to four times that of DAS environments.
By consolidating servers in a SAN environment, organizations can greatly reduce the number of devices and disparate systems they must manage—potentially saving a significant amount of money on server maintenance and personnel resources.
SAN at NIC
NIC has set up a state of art SAN in its data center at Delhi. Presently equipped with 8 Tera bytes of storage capacity this SAN can be upgraded to 30 Tera bytes. This SAN is being used as storage infrastructure for Web Sites, Portals, Citizen Services, Databases, E-Mail and other Internet services.