Employing IP SANs to address business needs - Storage Networking

In today's economic climate, enterprise IT organizations are challenged to minimize capital acquisition expenses (CAPEX) and operational expenses (OPEX) while meeting overall business objectives. Data storage needs continue to grow despite suppressed IT spending. This forces enterprise IT organizations to look for ways to maximize the productivity of their limited human and financial resources.

As part of their efforts to increase IT staff productivity and reduce software license costs, many IT organizations are consolidating their application servers and storage. They are migrating from direct attached storage (DAS) to networked storage to increase storage utilization and fulfill disaster recovery requirements.

However, the high cost and complexity of most Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) and components have hampered the adoption of SANs for the fastest growing segment of data applications, commonly referred to as functional or reference data. This type of data includes email, document and medical images, engineering designs, scientific data, multimedia content, and the like. While this type of data is mission important and needs to remain online and readily available for users, it typically does not justify the cost of implementing a Fibre Channel SAN solution.

The Internet and Engineering Task Force (IETF) recently ratified the draft iSCSI standard, which promises to provide a lower-cost option for users requiring high levels of performance and reliability for their SAN implementations. This has paved the way for a new class of smarter, more intuitive, yet much more affordable networked storage solutions that are a result of a fundamental shift in the way network storage is designed--from making storage an extension of the network to designing networked storage to be a native part of the network infrastructure. By leveraging established and broadly deployed industry standards, such as Ethernet, IP, and the vast selection of IP-based services, these new intelligent IP SANs will enable IT organizations to deliver cost-effective, easily managed, flexible networked storage as part of their strategic IT infrastructure.