Clustered Open SCSi SANs
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Industry Overview
IT
directors and administrators are faced with meeting their
organizations rapidly changing and growing storage needs. These
needs include reducing storage management costs, reducing
backup/restore times, meeting the 24x7x365 data availability needs
of today’s business environment. IT organizations are also faced
with implementing affordable off-site disaster recovery solutions,
creating easily scaling storage for new projects, providing a
diverse range of users and applications access to their information,
and reallocating or provisioning storage quickly with no downtime.
Addressing these needs also comes in the face of IT organizations
trying to control costs.
The
SAN-distributed architecture enables non-disruptive migrations,
upgrades, and capacity expansion. As data and applications increase,
users can grow individual volumes, add entire storage nodes to an
existing SAN cluster, or create a new cluster - all in an online
manner.
SANs
offer a number of sophisticated features that greatly simplify the
day-to-day management of data, including:
· Snapshots
· Thin
provisioning/auto grow
· Automated
load balancing
· Remote
copy capabilities between remote sites
· Synchronous
replication between locations (Campus SANs)
SANs and VMWare
SANs
are the ideal storage solution for virtualized environments because
of their own rich storage virtualization layer. Both the computer
infrastructure and the SAN storage infrastructure are fully
abstracted from the physical hardware.
KEY BENEFITS
· Make
capacity planning easier and less time consuming
· Provide
multiple ways to avoid planned and unplanned downtime
· Improve
storage and server utilization rates
· Streamline
both storage and server infrastructure management
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Storage
Area Networks - SANs 
