What are Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays?

The heart and soul of the storage industry still continues to be the SAN. (As a note, while in fact the SAN
is the actual network to which a disk array is connected, Ive found that many people actually refer to the
disk array as the SAN). Despite the meteoric rise in unstructured data growth and file content, SAN
arrays still account for a majority of the money spent on external disk storage worldwide. SAN connectivity
options traditionally were based around Fibre Channel, but in recent years the broader adoption of 10GbE
has firmly planted iSCSI as a mainstream choice. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) rounds out the
options, but has been a relatively slow starter in the market.
Independent of how you connect, SAN is all about the consolidation of multiple workloads into a shared
pool of capacity. The way that capacity is used depends on the host that a given volume/LUN is presented
to. The disk array itself simply presents the capacity; any file system or OS requirement is driven by the
host on the other side. The disk array itself is able to provide advanced data services such as multi-site
replication and sub-LUN data tiering across different physical disk types. Applying these data services
once at the array level can be much more efficient than managing them separately at the host level. This
is particularly true in enterprise environments where you may have dozens if not hundreds of physical
servers connected to the same disk array.

One of the biggest drivers of SAN segment growth in the last 10 years has been virtualization. In addition
to utilizing compute resources much more effectively, virtualization has provided the needed abstraction
layer between hardware and workloads to provide workload mobility. Moving applications across physical
hosts for maintenance, workload balancing, or disaster recovery requires shared storage. It will be
interesting to see if hypervisor vendors follow the likes of MS Exchange and build more storage smarts
into the hypervisor level. But for now, if you are running virtual servers, chances are that you are
connecting to some sort of shared storage device.

One interesting riff on the SAN song and dance is that of the Virtual Storage Appliancesoftware that is
able to utilize host-based DAS, but pool that capacity together and represent it out to applications as
shared capacity. This hybrid doesnt exclusively fit in DAS or SAN, but is really a blending of the two.
LeftHand Networks was one of the early pioneers in this space with their VSA solution. Originally
positioned as a starter SAN for those not quite ready for dedicated hardware, it has recently found an
entirely new market segment as large independent cloud providers look to build out shared infrastructure
in a more cost-effective way. VMware has seen the appeal of this approach and recently started including
a VSA within its vSphere product. While the VMware VSA is an early-generation product and therefore
feature-limited as compared to the LeftHand VSA, it is a good validation of this emerging space.

Another emerging category of SAN is that of the solid state disk (SSD) array. While functionally similar to
traditional disk arrays in that they present shared capacity to multiple hosts, these solid state-optimized
platforms are capable of reaching absurdly high IO points with extremely low latency. For certain highperformance computing applications, these are a great pick. Mainstream computing environments,
however, are more likely to benefit cost-wise from selecting storage that delivers robust data services and
utilizes sub-LUN tiering to move hot data onto an SSD tier dynamically and only as needed while still
maintaining a majority of blocks on large, low-cost disks. 3PAR was the first high-end disk system vendor
in the market to ship sub-LUN tiering software to capitalize on the fact that 90% of the IO on most systems

comes from less than 10% of the blocks. Its this reality that makes me think that highly optimized SSD
arrays are overkill for most and will continue to be a niche for a while to come.
One last topic worth touching on in the SAN category is that of Storage Federation. Much like VMware
vMotion lets you move VM workloads between hosts, Storage Federation is an emerging technology that
lets you non-disruptively move data volumes natively between homogeneous storage systems. Like other
array-based data services, federation can be a very efficient way to balance workloads, deal with
maintenance, or even take the pain out of infrastructure refresh actions. Similar to how Thin Provisioning
has become table stakes for disk systems nowadays, Storage Federation will become more and more
important as datacenter managers seek to manage capacity at a singular persistent level vs. managing
individual disk arrays.

Storage Area Network (SAN) Technology

What is it?
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is an enterprise-level storage network of several (often, hundreds) of hard drives
managed by an intelligent device. This allows for maximally efficient use of all available storage space, lowering total
costs of ownership (TCO) and increasing return on investment (ROI). Most importantly, if a drive crashes, the your
data is not lost!
Servers that host applications communicate with a SAN through fiber channel network equipment (iSCSI and F/C
over IP are also supported), and the SAN determines where data is stored. If a hard drive fails for some reason, the
other hard drives in the storage network essentially rebuild the data through a series of algorithms so no information
is lost.
The data on the hard drives is backed up every night to tape and stored off site as well. This protects against a
catastrophic systems compromise.
Technical details
The Data Center Services team manages several SANs in support of Medical Center hosted applications,
with terabytes worth of storage. Examples of these SANs are an IBM DS4400 and DS4500. They house critical
enterprise data including electronic mail, many relational databases (e.g., SQL, Oracle, DB2), File Sharing services,
and a wide variety of applications.
The DS4400s and DS4500s have several levels of redundancy. Aside from a physical level, they also have software
level redundancy. Each grouping of drives is configured as an Array. The RAID (Redundant Array of Independent
Drives) Level of the Array sets the amount of redundancy. The most common RAID Levels we use are 1, 5, and 10.
For RAID-1, 2 drives are used to mirror each other. For RAID-5, small parts of the data are written to each of the
drives allowing for a failure of any one drive. RAID-10 adds the redundancy of a RAID-1 and the performance of a
RAID-0 (not discussed here as there is no redundancy with RAID-0).
Each of these RAID levels are delivered by allocating one or more physical drives per Array. This means that if an
Array consists of 10 drives and is set at a RAID level of 5, then the usable space is the amount of 9 drives. RAID-10,
on the other hand, requires that each drive in the Array have its own mirror, which means that 50% of usable storage
is lost for redundancy and performance -- e.g. an Array of 3 drives will require 3 additional drives to house the
mirrored data, which brings the Array total to 6 drives. With this extra level of redundancy it is highly unlikely that data
loss or corruption will occur due to a physical loss of any one drive per Array.
Benefits to using Medical Center SANs:

Availability: Due to its multiple levels of redundancy, it reduces the level of downtime associated with
failures. A SAN allows for multiple physical connections to disks from single or multiple servers.

Disk Utilization: Space can be assigned to any server that needs more storage space, thus allowing you to
grow as needed with no downtime. This is referred to as storage on demand. The SAN enables more than one server
to access the same physical disk, which lets you allocate the free space on those disks more effectively. Because you
can use disk space more effectively, no space goes to waste, thus you don't need to buy disks as often as you used to.

Management: Storage is managed from a centralized location instead of on each server.

Reduced Data Center Rack Space: By consolidating storage on the SAN instead of on the servers, it
means that more servers with smaller footprint can be used. This eliminates the need for larger bulky servers.

Connectivity: The SAN uses Fibre Channel to connect to the servers allowing for faster and larger
throughput or I/O. The SAN drives are also Fibre Channel.

Improved Disaster Recovery Capabilities: Since storage is located on the SAN, a server failure can be
recovered much faster. SAN devices have the ability to mirror the data on the disks to another location. This can make
your data safe if a disaster occurs.

Vendor Consolidation: Pooled storage architecture can consolidate the number of vendors involved in
providing infrastructure services.

Clustering Support: All SANs support server clustering. One of the reasons a SAN is purchased is to
cluster multiple servers together while having the storage centralized on the SAN.

Removes the distance limits of SCSI-connected disks: The maximum length of a SCSI bus is around 25
meters. Fibre Channel SANs allow you to connect disks to your servers over much greater distances.

Better staff utilization: SANs enable more data management with fewer IT resources.
Example of a SAN configuration we use:

For more information about using the Storage Area Networking service to support your operation, contact Data
Center Services group