Earlier corporate purchased servers on a three-year cycle with direct-attached storage. Corporate were forced to project the storage for three years time frame with respect to that particular server. This kind of projection often resulted in an overbuilt server built with “just in case” variables and also resulted in a lot of wasted space for much of the life of the server.

Storage Area Network

SANs today come in two flavors: Fibre Channel, and iSCSI or IP-based SANs. Fibre Channel is the most well known type of SAN, but over the last couple of years, iSCSI-based SANs have started to hit the market in a big way, mainly due to their good performance and much lower cost versus Fibre Channel. Organizations are moving towards shared storage. Whether it’s Fibre Channel or iSCSI, the option to significantly overbuy just isn’t there. SANS are preferred in order to provide flexibility and administrative ease by organizations to give servers the ability to automatically grow their volumes on demand.

A proper SAN implementation, provides a completely redundant storage network that is eminently expandable to, literally, hundreds of terabytes, and also provides block-level access to the data just as DAS. One can also access data at a reasonable speed, making SANs good even for operations that require significant disk access. SAN provides centrally managed storage with the ability to provision space on-the-fly.

Thin Provisioning

Today one can configure SAN-attached servers with volumes large enough to meet the needs for the life of the server. On the SAN side of the equation, however, only the physical storage required for server application needs is actually released to the server. As the application needs grow, the SAN is configured to extend the volume until that volume reaches the configured maximum size.

By handling storage in this way, one gets to maximize the SAN storage investment and, once SAN capacity starts to hit a ceiling, say 80% used, one can add additional disks or shelves to the storage pool to expand the available space, all without having to continually manually expand SANbased volumes on your servers.

However There are two major drawbacks to a SAN: cost and complexity,
particularly when it comes to Fibre Channel implementations.

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