Storage
.:: Keep your data safe, keep it available
With the ever increasing need for greater storage capability in the corporate and e-business environment, storage technology has made great strides in the last few years, in terms of capacity, performance, reliability, and maintainability (less down-time).
Network Attached Storage
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is redefining the way data is stored and shared. This exciting new paradigm illustrates that rather than adding or replacing drives in file servers - a costly, inefficient and time-consuming proposition - to meet the mounting need for additional file storage, NAS enables storage appliances to be connected directly to the network, quickly and inexpensively. Adding a NAS appliance eliminates the need to bring down your server (and wait for it to come back up) to add storage. So no more downtime. Or MIS overtime. Just improved efficiency.
Fibre Channel
The Fibre Channel Standard (FCS) [1] defines a high-speed data transfer interface that can be used to connect together workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, storage devices and displays. The standard addresses the need for very fast transfers of large volumes of information and could relieve system manufacturers from the burden of supporting the variety of channels and networks currently in place, as it provides one standard for networking, storage and data transfer. Fibre Channel (FC) ports can be connected as point-to-point links, in a loop or to a switch. The ports in a point-to-point connection are called N_Ports; if they can work in a loop they are called NL_Ports. An FC switch, or a network of switches, is called a fabric. The ports of it are called F_Ports.
Both optical and electrical media are supported, working from 133 Megabits/sec up to 1062 Megabits/sec, while distances up to 10 km are possible. FCS has the ability to carry multiple existing protocols including IP and SCSI.
Storage Area Networks
There’s been a lot of talk about Storage Area Networks (SANs) recently. There’ll be even more in the weeks and months to come. That’s because no other approach to storage offers the impressive capabilities and benefits of SANs. Here’s some basic information designed to help you understand how SANs will play a role in your IT environment.
What is a SAN?
In its simplest terms, a storage area network (SAN) is an information infrastructure dedicated entirely to providing storage and storage management capabilities for an enterprise. It typically connects one or more systems from one or more vendors to storage devices and subsystems.
Why SANs?
Because SANs are dedicated entirely to storage and use fast Fibre Channel interconnect technology, they deliver levels of performance, speed, and flexibility that are simply unavailable from previous-generation approaches. The results are most apparent in five key areas - improved sharing, consolidation, accessibility, management, and protection of enterprise computing resources. The way to get gigabit speed (100MB/second), highly reliable, managed server-to-storage connectivity. The way to build an easily scalable, multi-terabyte storage network - never before possible. The way to deploy high availability server/storage clusters and free up your LAN from lengthy backup tasks by moving it onto the SAN.
