Do you currently have a Storage Area Network (SAN)? Do you need to expand or upgrade your current SAN environment?  At GTC we have a mature Storage Solutions Practice representing several top tier vendors such as NetApp, EMC, HP, Hitachi, and Dell.

In a SAN, all the disk drives are stored in a dedicated storage device — a disk array. All the servers connect to the storage device over a high-speed network that uses the Fibre Channel protocol, which enables access to disks over a network. Using a SAN gives businesses the ability to consolidate access to data storage plus the ability to connect servers to that storage from anywhere on the network.

Putting a SAN in place makes the server computers less important. Servers become more peripheral to the data that's stored in the SAN. After all, the data is what is important to your business. If you lose a server, you can buy a new one. If you lose your data, it could be detrimental for your business.

Benefits

The benefits of using a SAN are many because a SAN usually has a very high return on investment, makes the total cost of ownership of computing less, and has a pay-back period based in months instead of years.

Following is a list of just some of the ways you can expect a SAN to be beneficial.

• Removes the distance limits of SCSI-connected disks: The maximum length of a SCSI bus is around 25 meters. Fibre Channel SANs allow you to connect your disks to your servers over much greater distances.
  
  
• Greater performance: Fibre Channel SANs allow connection to disks at up to 200 megabytes per second today, with speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second in the near future.
  
  
• Increased disk utilization: SAN enables more than one server to access the same physical disk, which lets you allocate the free space on those disks more effectively.
  
  
• Higher availability to storage by use of multiple access paths: A SAN allows for multiple physical connections to disks from a single or multiple servers.
  
  
• Deferred disk procurement: Because you can use disk space more effectively, no space goes to waste, thus you don't need to buy disks as often as you used to.
  
  
• Reduced data center rack/floor space: Because you don't need to buy big servers with room for lots of disks, you can buy fewer, smaller servers, which takes up less room.
  
  
• New disaster recovery capabilities: This is a major benefit. SAN devices have the ability to mirror the data on the disks to another location. This can make your data safe if a disaster occurs.
  
  
• Online recovery: By using online mirrors of your data in a SAN device, you can instantly recover your data if it becomes corrupt.
  
  
• Better staff utilization: SANs enable fewer people to manage much more data.

Next Steps / How we can help

Let’s schedule a conference call with one of our consultants to learn more about your storage environment and needs so we can provide you with a proposal if needed. Click here to schedule a Conference Call

Partners in this solution

Our partners for this solution include NetApp, EMC, Hitachi, HP and Dell. Below are links to additional information

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