Storage Area Networks (SANs)

Has your network outgrown its storage space? You probably have more storage options available than you think.
Call Clarity IT Advisors now on 0845 8382494 and discuss how a SAN may be the solution you’re looking for.
FREE Guide to Storage Area Networks

SAN Benefits

• High transfer speeds for data
• Dovetails into high powered systems to provide instant access to data
• Reduces costs by utilising previously wasted storage space
• Ease of management, manage all your storage easily and quickly
• Instant, real-time, snapshot backups of your data

When you talk disk storage it’s easy to get confused by the multitude of acronyms associated with today’s offerings. Should you opt for SAN, NAS or even DAS? Will you use Fibre Channel or iSCSI? Which is the one best suited for your business needs? Your choice is critical.

Clarity IT Advisors are storage experts. Having implemented hundreds of systems we can ensure you get the right solution that best suits both your requirement and your budget.

Our SAN solutions will allow you to do more with less, enabling you to get the most from your investment whilst maximising your budget. How do we do this? Implementing a SAN can enable organisations to scale storage more effectively, support the continuous availability of data, and reduce the overall cost of your storage management.

As your data becomes a much more valuable asset, ensuring that it is stable and protected is more critical than ever. And as your data grows, the time required to back it up also grows. Many organisations cannot back up all their data as consistently or as cost-effectively as they would like. Instead, they have been forced to devise different backup strategies for various types of data that vary in frequency according to how critical the data is. By using technologies such as ‘Snapshots’ you can have a continuous backup, with no more overruns or deciding which files can be excluded from a backup. You’ll be able to restore or roll back data without your users even realising there was an issue.

Business Continuity

In addition to ensuring system stability, organisations must find ways to centralise business continuity management in diverse, distributed environments while keeping IT costs at a minimum. A SAN solution is a key component to any modern organisations business continuity strategy, giving your IT department multiple avenues to protect your all important data.

SAN Clustering and High Availability

Due to service-level agreements, industry regulations, or other business needs, organisations today demand the highest possible system availability. In fact, incidents that were previously viewed as minor unplanned outages now impact business operations severely. You can address this using a Storage Area Network. SANs can be designed to give you a high-availability environment that can help prevent or better tolerate system outages. When used in conjunction with a virtualisation solution, the level of protection available to your entire system is phenomenal.

Your data can be replicated in real-time to multiple locations ensuring that even if a whole storage system failed, you won't lose any data. In fact, your servers and end-users won't even be aware of the failure - they can carry on working as though nothing has happened.

Server and Storage Consolidation

Increasing demands on hardware, technology, and storage are forcing network administrators to better utilise their available storage assets. Migrating data and consolidating distributed or underutilised storage resources are no longer secondary projects for IT administrators, they are key to ensuring that networks perform at their highest possible output in these days of shrinking IT budgets.

Benefits of a SAN

One of the most important benefits of a SAN is that it simplifies your storage infrastructure and makes it easier to manage. SANs do this by means of consolidation, virtualisation, automation, and integration.

• Live mirroring of data, locally and even off-site
• Consolidation centralises the storage to improve scalability, reducing infrastructure complexity, and increasing efficiency.
• Virtualisation helps improve availability and reduces the cost of storage components.
• Automation of routine tasks allows the administrators to focus on critical issues and projects.
• Integration helps organisations equip users with the information they require in a more efficient manner.