SAN Advantages
There are many advantages of implementing Storage Area Network. The main advantage is that storage is centrally located within the organization or enterprise. For large networks, particularly where there are regularly about tens or hundreds of servers present with hundreds of clients, having a SAN serves to streamline and simplify a host of tasks which is the applications and data that are centrally located, upgrading infrastructures and storage space is simplified, repetitive routines like backups and application updates are easier and overall, network performance is improved.
Then, SAN also gives superior connectivity. In a SAN environment, every server on the network can address all the storage on the network, for distance up to 10 kilometers with Fibre Channel support. Furthermore, any storage device can communicate to any other storage device on the network. Such potential enables the utilization of existing storage resources that may be spread throughout an organization, and encourages wider implementation of remote vaulting, mirroring, and clustering solutions.
SAN allows users or administrators to virtually centralized storage. Administrators can use SAN to segregate physical storage devices from the virtual presentation that normal users or clients see. This segregation provides a high level of flexibility in issuing and reorganizing resources. As it already mentioned before, storage on a SAN is shared, which resulting in centralized management, better utilization of resources, and improved enterprise-wide data management and protection.
VIRTUALLY CENTRALIZED STORAGE
No other network architectures can match the degree of scalability that SAN produces. SAN completely increases performance. The storage capacity can grow, its performance can scale along with its topology, and its availability can increase by providing redundant systems and data paths. All these degree are done without involving continuing operations.