STORAGE SOLUTIONS
Enabling improvements in availability and performance.
The Storage Network Industry Association defines a Storage Area Network ( SAN ) as a network whose primary purpose is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements.
Sometimes referred to as the network behind the servers, a SAN is a communications infrastructure and a storage system with a management layer to organise connections, storage devices, systems and software so that data is transferred in a secure and robust way. SAN’s create new ways of connecting storage to servers, enabling great improvements in availability and performance.
While avoiding some of the traditional network bottlenecks, SAN’s can be used to transfer data between storage and servers in one of the following three ways:
- Server to storage
- Server to server
- Storage to storage
Data passing through the servers is minimised where possible to keep the servers free for system processing rather than data management tasks.
There are many benefits to using a SAN in an organisation and these can be summarised as follows:
- Higher availability and improved reliability of applications;
- Greater performance from applications;
- Centralised and consolidated storage;
- Supports disaster recovery/business continuity policies;
- Simple and cost effective centralised management of all devices
- Data integrity is ensured;
- Security policies for access rights can be enforced.
Data integrity is always at the core when we design a SAN solution.
CNT has experience of installing the latest SAN solutions and is not tied to anyone vendor, we choose the solution which best fits the server infrastructure whether thas Fibre, ISCSI or a combination of the two.