Storage Area Networks (SAN) The management of storage has become
a key issue for IT systems in the last few years. As the amount
of storage increases and the demands for high availability of
storage becomes more prevalent, having disparate pools of
storage across many servers becomes ever more complex to manage.
In the last few years, we have seen an increase in the
availability of the Storage Area Network (SAN). In simple terms,
this takes all the local disk storage usually found in servers
and consolidates it into a single, large pool. However, these
devices are more than just a simple NAS box. They concentrate on
making that storage highly available as well as providing the
tools to carve it up into appropriate capacities. One of the
biggest management headaches with traditional server storage is
we typically find large pools of unused storage, while pools on
other servers are bursting to the seams. A lot of support time
can be spent relocating data and then having to change
application configurations (whi