Storage Area Network Information Center

The first and most important step in designing a Storage Area Network (SAN) is to clearly determine your business and IT requirements. It's these requirements that should ultimately drive your design and component decisions.

DETERMINE YOUR REQUIREMENTS

Use the following questions to help identify and define your requirements.

Availability

• Which critical business applications do you need to safeguard against unplanned outages?
• What tasks do you need to perform (like adding or redeploying storage resources) without disrupting your business operations?

Scalability

Performance

• What are the peak performance needs of your key applications?

Management

• Which management tasks are currently difficult due to lack of resources or skills? What will these be in one year?
• Would you prefer to integrate your storage management into your existing management infrastructure?

Data backup

• By what percentage do you need to reduce your backup window?
• Do you need to relieve your LANs from backup congestion so that your applications can run faster?

Disaster Recovery

• In an emergency, what applications do you need to quickly and efficiently failover to your alternative data center?
• Do you have an alternate data center? If so, how far away is it from your primary data center?
• Do you need to clone or snapshot mission-critical data at peak production times?

Server and storage utilization

• How much available but inaccessible storage could be utilized by your data-intensive applications if it were shared across your enterprise?
• Do you have physical environment restrictions in your data center? If so, what are they?
• Which older, smaller-capacity storage devices could you consolidate into fewer, larger-capacity devices for easier management and to reduce service contracts?

Budget

• How much more storage could you utilize from current capital expenditures (allowing you to postpone new expenditures), assuming you could reclaim at least 30 percent of that under-utilized storage space?

IDENTIFY YOUR TOP PRIORITY

The most successful SAN deployments begin by targeting a single requirement. Take your list of business requirements and determine which is the most critical, then focus on designing, installing, and deploying a solution that will address that requirement. This will help you deploy your SAN quickly, cost-effectively, and easily. Once you have a successful SAN in production, you can use your results to demonstrate return on investment and provide business justification for deploying more SANs to address other important business requirements, or to expand your initial SAN.

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