simpleSAN
Management! Centralized
data storage management is perhaps the most compelling reason
to implement a SAN. The day-to-day management/personnel costs
alone (managing separate "islands" of storage [direct
attached storage and/or NAS]), incrementally eats at your
company's bottom line. Not to mention that each disparate
"island" storage solution comes with it's own management
tool and methodologies which puts a burden on your staff's
learning curve. Then add all the associated maintenance costs
for each individual solution. These expenses add up. By implementing
a SAN, you can realize a significant savings on your company's
hard and soft dollar costs right away.
Storage hardware consolidation is key. By managing your data
storage as a centralized resource across your enterprise,
you narrow down your storage management into one, centralized
environment. These management tools mask the complexity of
managing storage (provisioning, concatenation, RAID levels,
etc...) and centralizes it into one unified data storage solution.
This paves the way for near 100% data storage utilization.
So, rather than making hefty investments up front (ie, twice
the storage you think you need), buy only the storage capacity
you need today and only when you need it, just in time. Scale
your data capacity requirements on-the-fly, hot and on-line.
SANs provide you with the ability to scale with virtually
no limitations all the while using the same storage management
tool.
Centralizing your tape libraries and/or tape drives is also
another major benefit of SANs. Implementing one data repository,
ie tape library (or could be another set of disks), allows
for all your servers to backup to the same tape library which
includes automation, thus no human intervention. As we are
sure you've heard before, the less human intervention, the
lesser the costs and margin for error. Consolidating to a
tape library allows you to implement a tape format standard
within your organization. When a restore is required, you
can restore to any server/computer on the SAN.
Other management benefits:
Consolidated central management allows for a quicker learning
curve of the standardized data management tools you put in
place.This also allows you to educate a greater number of
employees for diversified expertise/data management availability.
SANs allow a multitude of different storage solutions to "talk"
to each other and share the same resources, ie a tape drive
iSCSI helps your realize these benefits rather quickly and
easily. Since it runs over your existing Ethernet infrastructure,
implementation can be implemented over your current investment.
So, there is very little initial costs involved. iSCSI represents
virtually no risks with a very high return on investment.
simpleSAN is well versed in the
benefits of SANs. From the management perspective to the implementation,
simpleSAN can help you realize
a huge costs savings when it comes to your data storage /
data protection needs.
iSCSI, all the availability,
scaleability and manageability benefits of fibre channel SANs
at a fraction of the cost and without the intense learning
curve.
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