Why you need storage consolidation :

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Your server administrators are putting in long hours to keep everything operational, and those cheap external disks fail way too often. They are overworked and are becoming dissatisfied.

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Your servers are running out of disk space faster than before and your team seems to always be more busy fighting fires, rather than implementing new core business strategy. You need to plan a server downtime for disk administration.

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You have no way to share the ample disks in one server with another that is running out of space.

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You have been tasked to save money by reducing your expenditures, and to do more with less, but your servers are running out of PCI slots for adding disk adapters (and there is no more internal room to add disks, so you have to buy more servers).

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Your network is getting slower, and backup is taking too long.
Storage Area Network

A SAN is a network of storage devices that are connected to each other and to a server, or cluster of servers, which act as an access point to the SAN.

A high availability high-performance dedicated storage network that connects servers & storage in a secure, flexible & scalable architecture. Advanced SANs have the ability to support intelligent storage management functions with minimal server involvement through a consistent centralized interface.

In some configurations a SAN is also connected to the network. SAN's use special switches as a mechanism to connect the devices. These switches, which look a lot like a normal Ethernet networking switch, act as the connectivity point for SAN's. Making it possible for devices to communicate with each other on a separate network brings with it many advantages. The ability to back up every piece of data on your network without having to 'pollute' the standard network infrastructure with gigabytes of data is one of the big advantages of SAN.

SAN allows overcoming limitations over the direct attach storage.

Click here to find out more benefits of SAN.

Click here to read more about Storage Virtualization.



                                                   
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