There are limitations to existing network connectivity. Enterprises often do not have enough bandwidth to service clients and to maintain data availability. Companies are also restricted by scalability issues, which limits future growth or the flexibility to provide optimum balance of server and storage capacity.
The growth in data intensive applications, such as data warehousing and mining and other business intelligence applications spur the demand for raw data storage capacity with analysts like the Strategic Research Corporation predicting that storage spend will increase from four percent in 2001 to 15 percent of computing budgets by 2003. Many companies are selecting a Storage Area Network (SAN) as their storage upgrade path as it offers solutions to their storage challenges.
Essentially the SAN is just another network contracted from storage interfaces. SANs are currently used to connect shared storage arrays, cluster servers for fail over, and to interconnect mainframe disk or tape resources to distributed network servers and clients, among others.
The SAN architecture holds a number of benefits for an enterprise. Firstly, a SAN is the best architecture available to create continuous operations and disaster tolerance. Many companies cannot afford the huge business losses of a disaster and the SAN mirrors data off-site creating disaster tolerant capabilities that enable application fail over if disaster should struck.
Secondly, a SAN creates a scaleable environment. Since storage and servers are independent from each other, storage devices or servers can be added or removed from their respective networks without creating problems with server configuration.
Lastly, although enterprise SANs are expensive to implement, SAN components can be implemented based on a company`s specific data access requirements. A SAN also substantially reduces costs through maximum centralisation and consolidation, which in turn reduces management, costs, and improves the ability to achieve continuous operations and improve productivity through universal access to information.
In conclusion, to install a SAN one will need to choose the right software solutions and integrated hardware to enable a company to achieve your continuous operations and data accessibility goals. To do this, select a vendor which has the interoperability testing and support services available to advise and work with the organisation through the entire implementation period and beyond.
Few companies have the expertise to design and install a SAN. Select a company with expertise in migrating applications to SANs. The company should have strong partnerships and offer solutions that scale to enterprise-level availability. Also look at the credibility of the vendor, from its references to its competent service personnel who will be responsible for solving the company`s future maintenance queries.
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Faritec, a leading, profitable IT company listed on the JSE, provides managed business and technology infrastructure solutions that are based on the O-system. This approach combines intellectual capital, resources, technology and business processes to provide tailor-made IT solutions. The company focuses on three major business areas, these include outsourcing including contracting, infrastructure, and inter-company processes with the objective of assisting customers to manage their businesses more effectively.
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