SAN技术文章

Call it economies of scale: As storage area networks get bigger, so do the associated savings – and so do the challenges of keeping them running at peak performance.

Clearly, SANs have taken center stage as the preferred method for enterprises to manage high volumes of information. But as enterprises look to consolidate more of their storage using high-performance, director-class Fibre Channel (FC) equipment, they're creating SANs that are larger and more complex than ever before. It's increasingly common for networks to span hundreds of ports in a single fabric, and for SANs to reach across multiple sites and disparate geographies.

The trick is to build SANs as large as possible while maintaining advanced security capabilities and unified management. This involves taking a range of considerations into account, such as:

Scaleability, resiliency, and performance
Cost of ownership
Fault isolation
Testing at all lifecycle stages
Storage management
The complexity of designing large-scale Fibre Channel SANs is the focus of this report, which provides an overview of the technologies and mechanisms that are pushing the upper bounds of SAN scaleability and reliability.

The main areas considered in this high-level, business-oriented report include:

Total cost-of-ownership factors of high-scale SANs
Why and how SANs are scaling to new heights
New technologies that are bringing routing and other advanced services to Fibre Channel
Survey of vendors in this space and what they offer
Business drivers for SAN extension across different networks
SAN extension operational modes and applications
Technology associated with the provision of SAN extension

Contents

Page 2: Key Factors for Larger SANs

Page 3: Large-Scale SAN Design Issues

Page 4: Traffic Engineering on the SAN

Page 5: Topology Considerations

Page 6: SAN Testing

Page 7: Equipment for Large-Scale SANs

Page 8: Size Comparison

This report was previewed in a Webinar moderated by the author of this paper and sponsored by Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO - message board) and Spirent plc (NYSE: SPM - message board; London: SPT). It may be viewed free of charge in our Webinar archives by clicking here.

Background Reading

Report: Storage Networking Basics
Report: Who Makes What




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