Benefits Of Storage Area Network
A Storage Area Network(SAN), whether virtual or conventional, provides a number of strong advantages that are essential for workloads of the corporate class.
Excellent performance
A distinct network fabric is used by the standard SAN for storage-related functions. FC fabric performs well, while converged networks and iSCSI are choices.
High capacity to scale
Large installations with thousands of SAN host servers, storage devices, or even storage systems can be supported by the SAN. By adding hosts and storage, the SAN may be customized for the enterprise.
High accessibility
A network fabric, which ideally links everything to everything else, is the foundation of a conventional SAN. This indicates that there isn’t a single point of failure between a host and a storage device in a fully functional SAN deployment, and communication throughout the fabric can never stop looking for methods to store burden.
Advanced management features
In order to optimize storage capacity, security, and data resilience, a SAN will enable a number of helpful enterprise-class storage features, such as data encryption, data deduplication, storage replication, and self-healing technologies. Almost all features are centralized and readily applicable to all of the SAN’s storage resources.
Disadvantages Of Storage Area Network
SANs have advantages and disadvantages, therefore IT directors should consider them before establishing or modifying one.
Complexity
Traditional SANs add the complexity of a second network with expensive, dedicated HBAs on the host servers, switches and cabling within a complex and redundant fabric, and storage processor ports at the storage arrays, even though there are now more convergence options for SANs, such as FCoE and unified options. Although careful planning and monitoring are necessary for these networks, their complexity is becoming more problematic for IT companies with less budgets and fewer employees.
Size
A SAN is often only useful in bigger, more complicated settings with a large number of servers and substantial storage, given the expense. Small-scale SAN implementation is undoubtedly feasible, but it is challenging to justify the expense and complexity. An iSCSI SAN, a converged SAN over a single common network, such FCoE, or an HCI deployment, which is skilled at resource pooling and provisioning, may frequently produce sufficient results for smaller installations.
Administration
In addition to the hardware-focused complexity, SAN administration presents a number of difficulties. For busy organizations, configuring features like zoning or LUN mapping might be challenging. Although it can take a lot of time to set up RAID and other self-healing technologies, along with the associated logging and reporting and security, it is necessary to maintain the organization’s compliance, DR, and BC postures.
Storage Area Network Protocols
The kind of connection that controls how switches and devices interact with one another inside a SAN fabric is called a storage area network protocol. One or more protocols may be used by a SAN. Some devices are routers and devices that support several protocols.
Better scalability, security, and management are offered by multiprotocol routers and devices. They allow communication between devices in different SAN fabrics without combining them into one big meta-SAN fabric. Multiprotocol routers and devices offer their own features, such zoning, and support a variety of protocols, including server message block (SMB), depending on the manufacturer. The types of SAN connections are as follows:
Interface for Internet Small Computer Systems
An IP-based standard protocol called the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) is used to connect data storage devices to a network and transport data by sending SCSI instructions across IP networks. Clients can utilise the same networking technologies for data networks, storage, and storage management when IP-based SANs are built using the iSCSI protocol. iSCSI may operate over nearly any physical network as it makes use of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
Fibre Channel Protocol
FC networks employ Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) serial SCSI command protocol. It has higher throughput than a LAN. It is the standard protocol for open systems and is a gigabit-speed network technology that is mostly utilised for storage networking. FCP, which was initially employed in the supercomputer industry, is now the common connection type for SANs in business storage.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
FC packets are routed over Ethernet using the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. It can make the SAN infrastructure more adaptable and straightforward. It substitutes a single device that can transport both IP packets and storage data for specialised switching systems for LANs and SANs. Converged networks are what these deployments are known as.
Fibre Channel over IP
Storage tunnelling or Fibre Channel tunnelling are other names for Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP). This technique enables the IP network to tunnel the transfer of Fibre Channel data. Since most businesses already have an IP infrastructure in place, connecting geographically separated SANs at a reasonable cost appeals to them.
Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fibre Channel
FC-NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fibre Channel, is a storage standard and host controller interface. It speeds up data transfer between solid-state drives (SSD) and business and client systems using a computer’s fast Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) interface.