Minding the Store

Optimizing Your SAN for Business Continuance

A shift is taking place in the way businesses deploy storage networks. The reason is that these networks have come to play a significant role in helping organizations to ensure business continuance during system failures and site outages. Where data backup was once confined to a few servers, tape drives, and switches—easily controlled and secured in a single data center—the spate of recent natural disasters and other emergencies has caused most businesses to rethink this design.

To better protect themselves, more organizations are backing up data in two or more locations and using TCP/IP protocols for fast, versatile access from distributed sites. The now common use of IP-based storage technologies such as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) and Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) allows users to be automatically redirected to backup resources in geographically diverse locations, in the event that data should become inaccessible in a primary site. This strategy is a boon to data availability; however, it brings with it some new considerations for the backup network.