ENTERPRISE STORAGE & BACKUP STRATEGIES / SANS

Due to the unprecedented explosion in business information and equally unprecedented requirements to maintain all data on-line, managing storage and backup has become a top priority. Companies are grappling with how to keep, transfer, share, and find information. In short, data must be a virtual resource that can be dynamically allocated. Companies require an enterprise storage backbone that provides performance, reliability, and manageability. This infrastructure must be scalable and flexible to respond to continually changing business requirements. 

Storage Area Networks (SANs) transform data storage investments into an efficient architecture to accommodate growing demand and provide continuous availability. SANs give distributed computing users access to data while re-centralizing the management of computing functions.

SANs Help Clients Address Their Most Critical Challenges
The most critical challenges confronting organizations are the need to reduce costs, provide continuous availability in support of 24x7 operations, centralize management, and support heterogeneous environments. The traditional practice of utilizing direct attached storage contributes to this predicament. Direct attached storage is inefficient, difficult to manage, and has limited scalability. Network attached storage (NAS) is the next logical step to increasing enterprise storage functionality and manageability. This resolves many of the issues impacting data virtualization but does not address performance and network bandwidth concerns. SANs avoid these limitations while solving organizations' most pressing challenges.

SAN Benefits:

• LAN-free Backups - Eliminates bandwidth constraints by taking the load off the network backbone. 
• Server and Storage Consolidation - Removing storage from servers reduces the number of servers required to support the enterprise and improves storage utilization. 
• Scalability - Independent scaling of the CPU and storage capacity. 
• Centralized and Enhanced Management - Provides a central point for managing and monitoring SAN activities, and flexibility to add or reconfigure storage as required without downtime. 
• Monitoring and Reporting - Increases efficiency by monitoring, identifying, and addressing SAN faults before they adversely affect the enterprise. 
• Faster Data Access - SANs are built on Fibre Channel technology which transports data at 100 Mbytes per second, five times faster than SCSI and ESCON, and ten times faster than Ethernet. 
• Higher Data Availability - SANs’ architecture allows redundancy to be obtained in a cost effective manner, and improves the ease of maintaining storage. 
• Extending the Distance of the I/0 Channel - Servers have access to storage over extended distances. Servers and storage equipment need not be located in the same building. 
• Virtual Elimination of Backup Windows - Data backups take place while the users are accessing data and do not require the system to be off-line. 

Intelligent Technology Solutions Delivers SAN's Full Potential

• Open SAN and Heterogeneous Support
  Discrete SAN solutions will not deliver the promise of SAN. Intelligent Technology Solutions utilizes best-of-breed technology from partners committed to an open SAN strategy. This currently allows storage to be used for any server in any environment. As the open SAN further develops, storage will merely be a service to which servers connect, independent of environment.
• Architecture and Design
  A properly designed SAN architecture can eliminate single points of failure and provide heterogeneous support for various server and storage devices. Another crucial design consideration is planning for future growth in order to provide scalability, prevent forklift upgrades, and allow for changes to servers and storage.
• SAN Management
  Intelligent Technology Solutions implements management tools to provide centralized management, monitoring, and reporting. Additionally, our consultants offer on-site or remote management for clients.
• Backup Strategies
  Intelligent Technology Solutions’ consultants identify our clients’ key concerns, issues, and goals. This information is utilized to develop an effective strategy and recommend solutions that provide reliable backup and restore of vital business information.
• Disaster Recovery
  Data mirroring provides disaster tolerance by incrementally replicating data to two different geographic locations.