SAN applications in today's world
Nowadays, Storage Area Networks (SANs) are considered as a vital part of any up to date High-Availability plan. An Internet Service Provider (ISP), a larger financial services enterprise, an educational institution, a government deparment or laboratory, a digital video production group, a television-broadcasting station moving to digital services, or any organization with increasing data storage needs are the main parties that need SANs.
Storage Area Networks may enable companies or organizations to operate in a business sense in a fundamentally new way, or in a way they have aimed to in recent years but the technology had really not been up to date or up to the challenge. Such organizations are usually geographically dissolved and depend upon timely and accurate information as the main corporate asset. Data is being considered as the 'life-blood' of the business. Today, the data required is stored in multiple, separated locations.
The information needed by these organizations may be contained in huge data storage but is more probably to be in the form of a combination of widely separated sources. These might include databases, email servers; but the huge amount of information is still held as normal files on the file systems. A high performance access to data for all authorized users across the business is needed to enable businesses to operate with a wide-open shared data concept.
Another business condition is that the information is always available. 'Always' here does not mean 99.999% system availability but it means 100% availability by users and their applications to the data. A Storage Area Network provides essentially very high availability by the use of automatic data redundancy, automatic backups and the maintenance of nearby disaster recovery copies. Clustered servers with shared access to the data that can enthusiastically switch users and applications between peers will significantly improve user and business application availability. The SAN architecture should also support in providing a smoother, more consistent service by adding load balancing to the high availability and performance already mentioned.