The document discusses storage area networks (SANs) and fiber channel technology. It provides background on SANs and how they function as a separate high-speed network connecting storage resources like RAID systems directly to servers. It then covers SAN topologies using fiber channel, including point-to-point, arbitrated loop, and fabric switch configurations. Finally, it discusses planning, managing and the management perspective of SANs in the data center.

1. Chung Phan CSMN 601 Spring 2001 Storage Area Network (SAN): The Technology Behind SAN

2. Agenda Cover Background An Overview of SAN’s Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology Planning and Managing SAN Management Perspective Conclusion

3. What is SAN? “ A SAN functions as separate high-speed network, similar to a LAN, that establishes a direct connection between storage resources, typically in a large redundant arrays of independent disks or RAID systems or robotic libraries, and servers or workstations.” A SAN is built on a separate network topology and for the most part does not rely on LAN protocols Background

4. Background (Cont.) In legacy servers, storage is connected directly to server or via the same LAN or WAN to communicate and exchange data But the capacity of disks attached to such server has grown exponentially in many cases multiple tera bytes. It is out of control... Currently there 3 different types of configurations: SAS, NAS, SAN Traditional model, storage attach server or (SAS) built on the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) parallel bus architecture Problem with SAS is associated with -Lack of speed -Propagation delay in the transfer data lines Additional SAS...

5. Background (Cont.) Server Attach Storage (SAS): usage and issue

6. Background (Cont.) Network Attach Storage (NAS): usage and issue

7. Background (Cont.) Storage Area Network (SAN): usage and issue

8. Background (Cont.) Example: notice that SAN has separate network clouds

9. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology SAN technology has been existing in the form of proposals and standards drafts for quite sometime, in 1995 the Fiber Channel architecture became ANSI standard and subsequently in 1996 the Fiber Channel products started to flood the market in huge volume

10. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) The ANSI T11X3 approved 1995 with max 1.06Gbps FC-3 for future use possibly datacompression

11. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) SAN topology consists of 3 different types: point to point, loop and fabric switch connection

12. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) Point-to-point Point to point topology is simple, direct connection between 2 nodes and future expansion in not predicted. Maximum throughput is 200Mbps full duplex

13. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) Arbitrated Loop Fiber Channel (FCAL) Most commonly deployed due to its flexibility but it is only limited to 127 attachments Bandwidth in FCAL is shared among other ports in the network with the maximum bandwidth 100MBps An example 50 nodes on a 100MBps network would evenly distributed to 2MBps per node

14. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) Fabric Switch (FS) Increase the aggregate bandwidth when additional port is added in gigabit range Ideal component for WAN or in extended SAN topology Can address up to 15 million unique identifiers Zoning allow segregation of devices by port or WWW number

15. SAN Topology and Fiber Channel (FC) Technology (Cont.) Typical SAN configuration environment

16. Planning and Managing SAN As SAN becomes more popular in the enterprise networks, fabrics composed of multiple switches will become more common place Show case application, such as full motion video editing and high performance relational data base servers and many data centers are already driving large fabric configurations According to Strategic Research Corp., a storage consulting firm, 80% of most servers today are SCSI or IDE So what storage can be migrated to SAN and how to manage it? Proper planning...

17. Planning and Managing SAN (Cont.) Considering these questions when your are planning for SAN: What data and applications warrant the added cost and complexity of a SAN? What storage should remain on less costly server-attached RAID? What kinds of user activity can be expected? How much capacity should each SAN partition have? Which SAN partitions should be more than one server share for failover?

18. Planning and Managing SAN (Cont.) SAN would definitely be beneficial to these areas: Mission-critical applications as the most obvious candidates for SAN migration Transaction processing, e-mail, Groupware, ERP, multimedia file serving, and database serving as applications that can benefit most from hosting their storage on SAN, due to its advantages in performance, availability, and data protection What about managing SAN?

19. Planning and Managing SAN (Cont.) Storage Virtualization There are software packages and resources available to manage SAN. A single concept behind those packages has driven SAN to this date is the storage virtualization Through storage virtualization an organization is able to create a single view of its storage systems With out storage virtualization it’s impossible to take full advantages of SAN. “ Virtualization is the holy grail of SANs” according to Netconvergence Inc. These are companies carry resource managing packages: IBM (Tivoli), Sun (SRM), Veritas (Sandpoint)…and many others

20. Management Perspective Many IT managers are looking at different ways approaching SAN in terms of costs and SAN's manageability. According to Ian Mount of www.ecompany.com “Users relied on the server to get the data they requested; if the server was down or busy with other things, they'd have to wait. Companies that wanted more storage space had to buy more servers, and as more data clogged the networks, they needed faster, cheaper, and more easily managed approaches.” Buying more servers and data clogged the network are the keywords when making decisions to migrate to SAN...

21. Management Perspective (Cont.) And those decisions are based on the current conditions, the applications, and feasibility of the network infrastructure To reduce the long-term costs IT managers should also look into the overall benefit of SAN such as the greater application availability, better application performance, practical data movement, and centralized storage.

22. Management Perspective (Cont.) Centralized Storage: By providing the means of storage consolidation, SAN delivers greater scalability, reliability, flexibility, and serviceability. Greater Availability: Because of no single point failure data can be accessed through alternate paths in cluster environment. Better Application Performance: No overhead on the primary LAN due to separate subnet design and it's server independent. It has no limitation on the sever Practical Data Movement: SAN enables cost-effective implementations of high availability, disaster protection configurations, like remote clusters, and mirroring

23. Management Perspective (Cont.) SAN issues and benefits

24. Conclusions Y esterday I used a SAN that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there today. I wish that SAN would go away.” By Doug Pryor, Server/Workstation Expert Magazine . SAN is not going anywhere as the matter of fact it’s gaining more speed everyday. According to IDG by 2003, 48% in the area of storage array are for SAN. NAS will reach to 23%, and and traditional disks attaching directly to servers is at 29%. In order to take full advantage of SAN one should keep in mind that preemptive is the keyword as part of solving business problem in order to keep it in operation 24/7. Focus in Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability

25. Conclusion (Cont.) According to IDG almost 80% of the major outages in the data center are caused by the process and the people. So when you are planning, implementing, and managing SAN make sure to keep these numbers in mind and think preemptive .

26. Additional information How to design a SAN http://www.storage.ibm.com/ Network storage solutions http://www.sun.com/storage/san/