An important step to managing, maintaining, and enhancing your Storage Area Network (SAN) is to create solid operational procedures. These procedures will help you meet your business requirements and customer service level agreements (SLAs), as well as help you efficiently manage and enhance your SANs for maximum return on investment (ROI). Also, they'll help you quickly diagnose and resolve problems. Overall, managing and enhancing your SAN is like managing and making changes to other infrastructure in your data center. Just extend your existing data center procedures to include SAN-specific tasks such as:
- Day-to-day management and monitoring procedures
- Service and support procedures
- Change control procedures
Day-to-Day Management and Monitoring Procedures
Your daily procedures should outline the management and monitoring tools that will be used with your SAN, and how these tools are configured. Your business requirements and commitments to your customers should drive these choices. (See the next step, Monitor and Manage Your SAN for more information on tools.) If you are implementing new tools or extending the use of your current tools, then your procedures may include new business policies to define the actions required when certain events occur. For example, if a threshold of a certain type and severity is reached, then a new policy may require that an on-call administrator get paged.
Service and Support Procedures
Ongoing service and support can be made more efficient by creating procedures to enable support staff to quickly, accurately, and efficiently identify and resolve problems. Troubleshooting guidelines and detailed instructions about maintenance contracts should be easy-to-find and follow. Step 3, Troubleshoot and Fix Problems, will outline these tasks in more detail.
Change Control Procedures
One of the benefits of SANs is that they are easy to change and scale to meet your varying business demands. Change control procedures help track what has been changed, when, and by whom. If follow-on problems arise from the change, then the problem can more easily be tracked back to a specific cause. Include guidelines for:
- Adding zoning and security
- Adding and replacing storage devices and hosts
- Upgrading and modifying the fabric
- Adding and replacing a switch
- Merging fabrics
Step 4, Secure Your SAN, and Step 5, Upgrade and Expand Your SAN, address how you can enhance your SAN.
 Previous: Manage and Enhance Your SAN
 Next: Monitor and Manage Your SAN
|
Subscribe for Nth News & Events
Email this page to a friend