Architecting SANs For Successful Deployments

Investing in architecting a Storage Area Network (SAN) today will not only solve your current issues of storage consolidation, improvements in backup and recovery or high performance data access, it will facilitate day-to-day support and maintenance in the data center. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. Investing in a discovery process of both your current needs and future expansion requirements will save lots of headaches and could save costly upgrades in the future. This paper examines the strategies in building a SAN architecture with considerations on fabric allocation, software needs and troubleshooting.

Architecting the SAN
The biggest impact to SAN performance will be realized through a solid SAN architecture and design. The infrastructure should be chosen carefully to ensure that the customer's requirements are addressed in the most efficient and resilient way possible.