simpleSAN - SANs made simple through the use of iSCSI

simpleSAN Storage Pooling! Storage pooling, concatenation, storage virtualization and storage consolidation are the most misunderstood benefits of SANs. In it's simplest form, the more you can get away from managing disparate "islands of storage" (which could even be defined as direct attached storage and/or NAS solutions), the more long-term cost savings your company will experience. Each of these point solutions carry their own set of limitations, management methods and support mechanisms, which incrementally eats at your company's bottom line. simpleSAN Storage Pooling

By consolidating your storage into one manageable maintenance / support platform, you can: (1) provide the same storage across heterogeneous environments (2) provision (slice and dice) your storage in any form or fashion for near 100% storage utilization (3) implement fault tolerance configurations for disaster recovery (4) dynamically allocate storage and provide "hot, on-line" file-system growth / physical harddrive growth for unlimited scalability of your organization's mission critical data (5) increase performance by load balancing data storage access and (6) invest to satisfy your storage requirements today knowing that you can scale in the future. Add the fact that these methods can be implemented with low cost IDE/ATA RAID solutions that are becoming more reliable and are approaching the speed/performance of SCSI. With these benefits, your customers, clients and/or end-users receive constant data availability with no "down time". Please refer to the "TCO and ROI of SANs" document for a more in depth explanation.

Implementing these costs savings into your environment using the iSCSI solution is as easy as setting up your Ethernet network. Chances are good you already have Ethernet and know how to manage your switches, hubs and routers. You've already setup volumes of storage with "logical volume manager" within your O/S. So, little investment and little-or-no learning curve is required to start benefiting from this methodology.

Sample benefits would be:
• Setting up RAID levels across separate iSCSI RAID arrays for redundancy of data / hardware and enhanced performance.
• Setting up a RAID Array to support multiple servers and applications for a centralized data storage repository.
• Combining (concatenation) Logical Unit Numbers (LUN's) into one logical volume which allows you add more storage and increase file system size dynamically, "hot, on-line". Resulting in no downtime.

Each of these methods can be implemented and shared across a combination of O/Ss, across a combination of RAID manufacturers. Leaving you with only one centralized storage infrastructure to manage and support for all your servers.

simpleSAN's experienced staff helps customers assess their needs and designs cost saving storage management solutions to meet their mission critical requirements.

iSCSI, all the availability, scalability and manageability of fibre channel SANs at a third of the cost and without the intense learning curve.