Product manager at Drive Control Corporation, Rajen Naicker, says storage area networks (SANs) continue to offer key benefits such as improved data availability and the ability to keep pace with data growth as needed.
This is contrary to a recently updated Forrester report, which casts doubt on the value of SANs.
According to the report, SANs are plagued by low capacity utilisation, an inability to prioritise application performance and soaring costs. But Naicker says if SAN works as it should this will not be the case.
He points out that often low utilisation is not a result of the technology itself but the management of the infrastructure. “It's pointless to blame a system if the team that manages it isn't applying due diligence.”
Naicker says customers who manage their storage well will probably do the same for their internal storage and other options such as direct-attached storage. “The ability of SAN to move capacity is a major plus and adds to the utilisation of resources - again - if managed properly.”
Another issue, according to Forrester, is provision application performance. “Here, we can again blame it on the utilisation of the SAN as opposed to the solution itself,” Naicker states.
“When properly managed and incorporating both serial attached SCSCI (SAS) and serial ATA (SATA) drives, high-availability applications, for example, should be stored on the SAS drive which offers the high performance and capacity needed to run these applications.”
He argues that it is ultimately about managing SANs in a way that ensures application requirements and performance are met. “With a SAN, be it fibre or iSCSI-based, an enterprise can consolidate its storage resources and provision them to servers according to need.”
Naicker notes that iSCSI SANs, based on Ethernet technology which is already well-understood and inexpensive to deploy, offer the key advantages such a the ability to easily connect to virtually any server. “So the issue around soaring solution costs is not really a valid point,” he concludes.
Related stories:
Cloud storage partnership formed
German telcos step up convergence
Share