What is Storage Area Network?

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a specialized, anchored high-speed network. It provides block-level network access to storage. Storage Area Network makes a network of storage devices accessible to multiple servers. Storage Region Network devices appear to servers as attached turns. Storage Area Networks are made up of hosts, switches, storage area elements, and storage devices – linked by using a variety of technologies.

Types of SAN Solution

• Dietary fibre Channel (FC): A dietary fibre channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) permits multiple servers to access network storage devices. Storage and servers are linked via a high-speed network of interconnected fibre channel buttons. A storage area network permits high-performance data transmitting between multiple storage devices and servers. This can be used for mission-critical applications where uninterrupted data access is essential.
• Net Small Computer System Program (iSCSI) Protocol: This system shows the overall flexibility of a low-cost IP network. This permits the transport of block-level storage traffic over IP networks. It forms on two widely used technologies – SCSI instructions for storage and IP protocols for networking. The protocol is employed on computers (initiators), storage devices (targets), and protocol transfer entrance devices.

SANs enable companies to manage accelerating amounts of data far more effectively. Both provide advantages based on business requirements.

Advantages of Storage Area Network

• Info Center infrastructure should develop rapidly to improve resiliency, increase business responsiveness, and keep plan the growing demands of recent applications while reducing overall electric power consumption. Storage costs are more than server cost. Hence organization require successful and cost-effective storage area networks (SAN)
• SAN storage plays an important role in an organization’s Business Continuity Management (BCM) activities.
• SAN boosts application availability and enhances application performance. Applications fail because of data becoming corrupted by things, not on track with the disks that applications use. The storage arrays in SAN use very good data protection methods to make certain that your computer data remains consistent.
• SAN simplifies storage administration and adds flexibility since cables and storage devices do not have to be physically moved to shift storage from one server to another.
• SAN increases storage utilization and effectiveness.
• Disaster Recovery: SAN enables effective disaster recovery processes. SAN spans a distant location containing a secondary storage array. This enables storage replication either implemented by disk array controllers, server software, specialized SAN devices.
• Storage Virtualization: Server capacity is not linked to single storage devices. Large and consolidated storage pools are available for software applications.
• High-Speed Disk Technologies: Data retrieval speeds that exceed 5 Gbps is available using SAN.
• Centralized Backup: Servers view stored data on local disks, rather than multiple disk and server connections. SAN offer advanced backup features, like block level and incremental backups, streamline IT system administrator responsibilities.
• Dynamic Failover Protection: Provides continuous network operation, even if a server fails or goes offline for maintenance, which enables built-in redundancy and automatic traffic rerouting.
• SANs address the bandwidth bottlenecks associated with LAN-based server storage. Data is kept on the SAN, the transfer does not pollute the LAN, and the server processing resources are still available to systems.