The State of SAN Steve Terrill Manager of Systems Architecture Interstate National Insurance

Key Trends External storage becoming SAN storage FC becoming the incumbent interconnect technology System integrators remaining a primary SAN channel Data replication use increasing in B/R & DR Staff and skills shortages Emphasis on ease of deployment and management

Key Trends Pre-SAN Post-SAN SNMPSNMP Fragmented Storage View Unified View Internal DAS

SAN Value to the Open System Environments Storage consolidation Better backup and recovery Higher availability Better scalability Proprietary data sharing Lower TCO Long-Term Storage resource pooling Standardized data sharing

The Current State of SANs Hardware infrastructure is in ready state PCI to Fibre Channel HBAs Fibre Channel directors, switches and hubs Fibre Channel to host RAID controllers Robust storage enclosures SAN management software evolving to vendor definitions Competing MIB/API standards Vendor-defined storage/volume sharing Heterogeneous SAN management software is unlikely in near future

Making the business Case Making the business case to move to a centralized storage scheme may not necessarily be an easy one to make for some organizations. Often times businesses are more concerned with the initial hard dollar cost, than the aggregate potential savings. TCO ROI Must Look at all savings, hard and soft

What Strategies? The key strategies necessary to achieve the best use of a centralized storage solution. 1. Data Management strategy 2. Charge Back Strategy 3. Server Consolidation 4. Data Priority strategy 5. Disaster Recovery Strategy With the combination of these strategies the savings in long term hard dollars, short and long term soft dollars and lower administration costs will surpass the initial hard dollar expenditure.

Pros and Cons? Pros: Reduced Administration Scalability Centralized backups Lower backup administration costs Reduced backup windows Open Systems Architecture Better disaster recovery options Easily expandable Reduced response times Faster data access Cons: Significant initial investment (basically pre-buying storage) Learning curve Difficult to manage without appropriate strategies No standardization across vendors Minimal skilled resources available

Summary SAN Technology could ultimately benefit many businesses with the capability to easily manage and scale their storage. Potentially reducing the overall IT costs spent on additional storage and servers, while improving the level and speed of service to the business.