Why a SAN? SANs provide unprecedented levels of flexibility in system management and configuration. Servers can be added and removed from a SAN while their data remains in the SAN. Multiple servers can access the same storage for more consistent and rapid processing. The storage itself can be easily increased, changed, or re-assigned. In a SAN, multiple compute servers and backup servers can access a common storage pool. The SAN offers configuration choices that emphasize connectivity, performance, resilience to outage, or all three. SANs bring enterprise-level availability to open systems servers. Properly designed SAN storage is always available. This allows many open servers to access a common storage pool with the same degree of availability previously reserved for mainframes. SANs improve staff efficiency by supporting a variety of operating systems, servers, and operational needs. A SAN is a robust storage infrastructure that can respond quickly to new business models, unexpected growth surges, and corporate mergers. SANs can reduce application response time, improve processing throughput, and support high-performance backup and rapid restores. SANs enable new functionality concepts such as zero backup time, they support remote data copies at nearly unlimited distances, and they support improved business continuance scenarios involving disaster recovery planning and disaster tolerant configurations. SANs also support the latest storage security measures, and they can be managed by Web-based tools from any location. In a well-designed SAN, these features are complementary and cumulative; that is, a SAN can incorporate all of these features, or you can start with a SAN designed for any one of them and add other features later. SANs enable economy of scale that was previously unavailable to open systems in the areas of backup, management, growth, and performance. Because of this flexibility, a SAN can grow and adapt to the changing computer storage system needs of the most challenging business environment.
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