Building a Solid Foundation for Enterprise Applications

Although storage networking technologies are commonly available to the entire market, each enterprise or institution is unique. Customizing an implementation to meet your specific needs therefore requires an understanding of your organization's primary business requirements. Business requirements drive the guiding principles of what a solution should provide, and those principles establish the parameters of the final design.

Ideally, a data center Storage Area Network (SAN) design should be flexible enough to accommodate both current and anticipated future needs, typically looking out three years. Although business expansion is rarely linear, it is helpful to compare an organization's current storage infrastructure to the one it had three years ago. For most companies, that historical reality check reveals a substantial increase in storage capacity, servers, tape backup loads, and complexity of the fabric. That growth may be due to natural business expansion or simply to the proliferation of compute resources to more parts of the organization. In either case, the steady growth of data assets increases the gap between the sheer quantity of storage data and the amount that is adequately protected.

A carefully considered SAN design can help close this gap. In addition, building a SAN infrastructure that accommodates growth in servers and storage capacity over time must take into account that power resources are not infinite. A properly architected SAN can increase the efficiency of power utilization in the data center to minimize power costs and reduce the carbon impact of IT services.