Storage Area Networks promise to become the data storage solution of choice for e-business environments, liberating data across a number of network topologies.
The hardware components of the SAN provide the repository for the data, and most SAN hardware repositories also provide some of storage management capabilities built in. However, since such storage management is, by nature, confined to the unique hardware platform, the cost of such a network will escalate out of control if platform-independent management software is not used to control an enterprise-wide storage configuration.
Other advantages that SAN delivers to e-business, such as increasing bandwidth, faster response times and greater data transfer capacities, present associated risk if not covered by an enterprise wide storage management blanket.
"A SAN network is the answer to an e-business environment where huge amounts of data may be available on-line," says `s Phil Coombs. "Storage management is fundamental to ensuring data security and integrity, and for optimising data access and throughput. In other words, your data must be correct, protected and available at the right place at the right time.
"Enterprise data management should not be confused with the data management solutions that are offered by storage (hardware) suppliers, simply because they tend to be proprietary and are limited in their functionality and range of influence. To gain the "big picture" of data, organisations need to deploy a software management solution that is hardware-independent and enterprise wide."
Coombs points out that a SAN environment combined with an e-business network will lead to rapid, unpredictable data storage growth. "The SAN becomes a high risk feature if costs cannot be predicted or controlled. IDC says the three-year total cost of ownership of storage is five times the initial investment. An unnamed financial services company spent $20 million on non-budgeted storage in 12 months.
"Once storage management is removed from the hardware environment and is application driven, the process becomes proactive rather than reactive and data management becomes a business issue rather than a technology issue," says Coombs.
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