In most medium and large enterprises, administrators have witnessed a sharp increase in the demand for secure and rapid access to their data. In heterogeneous operating environments it is often essential that application servers are not used to host storage systems.
The reasons for this are many, but primary of them is performance, redundancy and ease of backup. In many operating environments, especially medical environments, high-availability means 7x24 service. If your storage is hosted by single host machine, and if that machine has a fault, all systems dependent on that storage go down. If a system hosts both a business critical application and your storage, performance will suffer as this host will be interrupted by requests from other hosts reading/writing data to these disks. The same holds true for backup. Imagine a hospital system which is constantly accessed while simultaneously attempting to service requests from the backup subsystem.
We often get the question asking - why not let each machine use its own internal disks? This may work in smaller organizations if proper steps are taken to ensure redundancy of data. But for the larger enterprise this approach drives up maintenance costs while often decreasing performance and failing to meet the objectives of highly-available systems.
The solution? As with all things it is all a matter of the objectives and budget of the organization. For smaller organizations, a storage area network (SAN) is not usually warranted and adds needless complexity to management and maintainability. Fortunately for smaller practices and organizations, there are many cost effective solutions that increase performance, availability and facilitate easy backup. For larger organizations, network attached storage and storage area networks may make sense.
At L4 Networks, our IT consultants will examine your current storage subsystems, your needs, goals and cost constraints and can then map a clear path and present a set of alternatives, system specifications and recommendations which support these objectives. We can help you with managing the implementation as we are also experienced IT project managers.Storage Capabilities at-a-glance
- Architecture & Design reviews
- Cost Benefit Analyses
- New System Planning and Design
- Enterprise SANs Non-blocking Architectures
- Network Attached Storage
- Vendor RFPs
- Fibre Channel Switching Fabrics
- Test & Implementation (IT project management) Services