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Industry Statistics

RFG: Revisits the Storage Area Network

Printed with permission from the January 20, 2005 RFG (Robert Frances Group) Research Note. www.rfgonline.com

RFG believes enterprise adoption by IT of storage area networks (SANs) was slowed by the belief, real or perceived, that such networks were difficult and complex to install and maintain. SANs were also perceived or portrayed as failure-prone and often problematic in delivering the promised ROI. Fortunately, most of these problems have been resolved. IT should examine new SAN technologies, matching them against strategic storage plans at their enterprises, to determine where there may be important potential benefits.

Business Imperatives

  • It took a long time for SANs to become assimilated into the IT infrastructure. While storage vendors were touting the benefits of SANs, user after user was reporting the difficulty of installing one on time and on budget. Users could use a plethora of "parts" from one storage vendor to construct a SAN. Alternatively, IT could install a SAN using best-of-breed components from a number of storage vendors, finding itself in the role of SAN systems integrator. Given vendor advancements in SAN technology, IT executives can now focus on the benefits of installing a SAN and selecting an appropriate vendor without such concerns.
  • The purpose of a SAN is to manage vast amounts of storage as simply as possible and provide a transport mechanism for this storage to be accessible from many different hardware platforms. It is supposed to simplify and facilitate changes to the storage infrastructure, increase the amount of storage that a storage administrator can manage, and allow the simultaneous use of shared storage across a variety of IT platforms. Such benefits have been enhanced by recent vendor announcements, marrying imbedded mainline storage devices to the SAN infrastructure. IT executives should examine the latest offerings to determine where and how such devices can be of benefit, now, more than ever before.
  • Installing the next major storage subsystem may be the trigger point to cause IT to determine that this is the opportune time to include that system in a SAN in a sequential, phased approach. Vendor selection becomes even more critical at this point and the cost-per-megabyte less and less important. IT executives should take this opportunity to review the IT-storage vendor relationship, consider issuing requests for proposal, and re-evaluate their overall storage strategy.

IT executives continue to struggle with the issue of information management. As data volumes have increased, so too has the complexity of the IT infrastructure. As IT executives attempt to find better, more efficient means of data management, vendors have responded by offering new technologies.

Storage area networks offered the promise of increased bandwidth, backup/recovery, manageability, productivity and cost benefits derived from centrally managed storage. However, early vendor offerings were immature, and early enterprise SAN implementations were often fraught with problems as a result.

Today's SANs have advanced since those early days. New offerings are designed to help reduce or eliminate problems with interoperability and network connectivity, and are also designed to help ease the implementation and management concerns of the enterprise IT department. Current SANs can provide a number of benefits, including the following:

  • Allowing remote location of hard-disk storage subsystems and tape libraries
  • Connecting with high speed Fibre Channel
  • Pooling resources, which can be done across multiple devices on the SAN
  • Scaling to massive server-storage configurations
  • Supporting block-level input/output requests

The Importance of Planning

Having a clear understanding of enterprise needs and business goals will help to ensure an IT project's eventual success, and the implementation of a SAN is no exception. IT executives should work with line of business managers to determine their data management needs. IT executives should also employ the use of business application and user application profiles (BAPs and UAPs) to aid in the assessment process.

Once business needs are determined, IT can turn its attention to the current enterprise infrastructure. IT executives should perform an assessment to determine what devices they have in house and what network connections exist. They should also determine what upgrades will be necessary, if any, to existing storage devices, switches, and/or software to aid in supporting the SAN. With the assessment in place, IT can begin to evaluate current technologies and vendor offerings.

SAN Technologies Today

Numerous vendors offer SAN technologies. Figure 1 highlights a number of products currently on the market, but is not comprehensive.

Figure 1: Selected Enterprise SAN Offerings

The move to a centralized architecture can assist IT in a number of efforts. Of particular note is the use of SAN deployment to facilitate information life cycle management (ILM). The SAN helps to consolidate information across distributed servers, allows for automated management and can provide virtualization capabilities. All of these can aid IT's efforts in ILM, protection of intellectual property and risk reduction.

As ILM operates at the block level, a SAN infrastructure allows for tracking of individual disk blocks. With the use of ILM software monitoring tools, IT can determine which blocks are being used most frequently and least frequently, and can move those blocks to faster storage without disruption. Such capabilities can facilitate automated policy-based storage provisioning, and, as data is pooled in a central resource, it allows various business units to mine the cross-enterprise knowledge, leveraging such information for new projects and initiatives.

Selecting a Vendor

While recent vendor offerings are somewhat less complex than their predecessors, SAN implementation is still an involved undertaking. Therefore, IT executives will need to consider factors beyond just the technology brought to the table by the vendor. IT executives should evaluate the business relationship each vendor brings to the table and whether that vendor is perceived as a potential long-term business partner. IT should consider the benefits to be leveraged from utilizing a single, preferred vendor of choice and manager of the entire SAN installation project and subsequent operation - regardless of the number of vendors actually furnishing hardware or software. As stated by Sun's CEO Scott McNealy, " What this means is you have...only one throat to choke" (for example, when the SAN fails at 3:00 a.m.).

In order to understand fully the vendor offering in terms of product, services and support, IT should develop a request for proposal (RFP). The RFP should outline the purpose of the SAN implementation (garnered from the BAP and UAP assessment). Other factors to be considered for RFP inclusion include the following (in logical order of presentation):

  • A description of the present network infrastructure, including products and services utilized
  • Specific hardware and/or software that must be included in the SAN proposal
  • Performance expectations
  • Dates for service delivery/installation
  • Customer references
  • A schedule for RFP delivery
  • Problem escalation description
  • Service level agreement requirements
  • Vendor proposal requirements 

Once the resulting vendor proposals have been returned, IT executives should review them and then arrange for on-site meetings with their top vendor choices. IT executives should request product support and testing matrices, particularly for multivendor installations, to allow for comparison across product lines and against enterprise requirements. This is the time for IT to try to assess what unique products or skills each vendor can provide that would work to ensure the success of the installation. If the products and configurations from more than one vendor appear competitive, revisit the question of the most viable business partnership again. Finally, IT should also work with the vendor to outline contract terms, such as financial incentives for meeting service levels and annual (or more frequent) performance reviews, to ensure proper SAN operation.

RFG believes today's SANs have advanced since their challenging, early beginnings, and the time is right for IT to reconsider SAN installation, as the benefits finally appear to outweigh the risks in most cases. With the ability to attach high-end storage devices to the SAN, the potential benefits, such as use of virtualization technologies, are compelling. SANs, however, are still complex. Selecting one "vendor of choice" upon which to rely remains critically important. IT executives should dedicate enough time to ensure that they are comfortable dealing with their selected vendor as a business partner and that they are not simply seeking the cheapest storage cost.

For more information please visit the Web site at www.rfgonline.com or contact the author, RFG analyst Ed Broderick, at clientservices@rfgonline.com.


Ed Broderick is an analyst with the Robert Frances Group (RFG). You can contact him at client.services@rfgonline.com or (203) 291-6900.

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