SAN (Storage Area Network)
SAN (Storage Area Network)
A storage solution is an important consideration for any business, especially in this age of information, AI, and big data.
An organization’s choice of a storage system can be a simple or complicated decision depending on the size and complexity of the organization’s and the extent to which they use and value their data.
Such delicate decisions and balancing acts include costs, current and projected storage capacity needs, and scalability, among others.
There are three primary options for an organization’s or business’s data storage systems, i.e., SAN (Storage Area Network), NAS (Network Attached Storage), and DAS (Direct Attached Storage).
SAN (Storage Area Network)
This is a type of storage network that allows an organization to connect storage devices like disk arrays, tape libraries, and switches to servers and access these pooled resources from any server on the network.
While previously only a limited number of storage devices could connect to a server, a SAN allows the flexibility to connect to one or more servers, and multiple users can share a pool of storage resources.
SAN is often used as dedicated storage for professional and enterprise environments.
Advantages of SAN
Increased storage capacity
With externalized storage, storage capacity can easily be increased to the network’s maximum limit. A SAN can support hundreds of drives using disk arrays.
A disk array is a group of disks that work together to achieve higher data transfer and input/output rates than those provided by single large disks.
Better performance
As opposed to traditional file server and storage solutions, SANs, using block storage, connect the data source directly to the target, which increases throughput and delivers faster performance.
Enhanced availability
Since storage exists independently in a SAN, it’s more fault-tolerant than a server with disk arrays connected to it, for instance.
The malfunctioning of one or two disks will not have adverse effects as the other functioning disks will continue working unencumbered, making it a reliable storage solution for mission-critical stored data and disaster recovery.
When to use a SAN
For transaction processing systems, e.g., credit card processing and telecommunications, which require a large amount of throughput
• For enterprise applications that need to be centrally managed and facilitate disaster recovery and thus need to be on a shared platform
• For database servers used in online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP), high-traffic e-commerce sites, and such that require high-performance block-level input/output that can handle thousands of transactions per second.
• For virtualization hosts, virtualizing servers utilize SAN because of its easy scalability and its capacity to deliver high performance.
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Source: LinkedIn
Credits: Mr. Tarek Lotfy’s Post
