1 SAN design overview
SANs provide the data communication infrastructure for advanced, cost-efficient storage systems.
SAN technology offers investment protection, management features, and I/O price performance to
minimize capital expense. HP StorageWorks SAN architecture provides open network storage solutions
for all sizes and types of businesses, including small-to-medium-sized IT departments and enterprise
environments.
This chapter describes the following topics:
• SAN solutions, page 27
• HP SAN implementations, page 28
• SAN components, page 29
• Fibre Channel technology, page 29
• Storage area networks, page 29
• SAN infrastructure, page 30
• Fibre Channel switches, page 31
• SAN design approaches, page 31
• Design considerations, page 32
SAN solutions
SANs provide flexibility in system management, configuration, connectivity, and performance to meet
the needs of the changing business environment. For the most challenging IT problems, SANs offer
resilient solutions:
• Open systems
SANs support various operating systems and servers to meet your operational requirements. A
robust storage infrastructure accommodates new business models, unexpected growth, and
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corporate reorganizations.
• Fast backup and restore
SANs remove backup and recovery traffic from the LAN, reducing congestion, improving backup
windows, and efficiently utilizing storage resources. You can use centrally managed, high-
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performance tape libraries to reduce backup overhead.
• Business continuance
SANs can eliminate single points of failure, incorporate failover software, and support mirroring
at geographically dispersed data centers for disaster recovery. You can quickly restore productivity
after a power failure or component downtime.
• High availability
Redundant fabric designs, storage replication, dynamic failover protection, traffic rerouting, and
server clustering enable SANs to provide enterprise-class availability to open systems servers.
• Server and storage consolidation
Multiple servers and backup systems can share storage for efficient processing and increased
availability.
SAN Design Reference Guide 27
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