JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report: Storage Area NetworksNovember 2003
TSW 03-07November 2003 ©JISC 2003
JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report
STORAGE AREA NETWORKS
Steve Chidlow, UNIVERSITY of LEEDS(S.Chidlow@leeds.ac.uk)
Page 1 of 21
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
AUTHOR:
Steve Chidlow
JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report: Storage Area NetworksNovember 2003
Contents
Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................................. 21.0 Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 32.0 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 33.0 The Technology ............................................................................................................................. 33.1 Defining the Storage Technology: DAS, SAN, NAS ................................................................. 33.2 The Fabric – Switches, Fibre Channel, iSCSI technologies ...................................................43.3 Disk Technologies ......................................................................................................................... 63.4 Storage Arrays ............................................................................................................................... 64.0 Centralised Backup Systems ..................................................................................................... 85.0 Strategic Fit and Industry Positioning ....................................................................................... 86.0 Data Growth Rates and Their Management............................................................................ 97.0 Storage Management................................................................................................................. 107.1 SAN Management....................................................................................................................... 107.2 Storage Virtualisation ................................................................................................................ 107.3 Storage Resource Management.............................................................................................. 117.4 SMIS/Bluefin Storage Management Initiatives ...................................................................... 128.0 Data Categorisation Strategy ................................................................................................... 129.0 Fit of a SAN into a Data Categorisation and DR Strategy ................................................... 1310.0 E-Science/Grid Support............................................................................................................ 1311.0 Benefits of a SAN ...................................................................................................................... 1311.1 Reduced hardware capital costs ........................................................................................... 1411.2 Reduced effort to manage storage ....................................................................................... 1411.3 Increased productivity through improved fault tolerance and DR capability .............. 1411.4 24x7 Availability ....................................................................................................................... 1411.5 More efficient backup .............................................................................................................. 1411.6 Scalable Storage ....................................................................................................................... 1511.7 Interoperability between diverse systems .......................................................................... 1511.8 Centralised Management........................................................................................................ 1512.0 Justification for SANs – Writing the Business Case ............................................................ 1513.0 Risks/Issues ................................................................................................................................ 1614.0 Glossary ...................................................................................................................................... 1715.0 References and Further Information ..................................................................................... 20
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to my colleague Adrian Ellison, who jointly authored with me the document “BusinessJustification for the Deployment of a University Storage Area Network”. This was the business case for a SANat the University of Leeds and is the basis for several sections of this document.Page 2 of 21
JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report: Storage Area NetworksNovember 2003
1.0Executive Summary
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Demand for data storage capacity and data availability across the UK HE and FE sector is growingrapidly; this demand is mirrored across other business sectors.
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A Storage Area Network (SAN) can provide a total solution to for the storage needs of HE/FEinstitutions in a cost effective way, despite perceived high initial purchase costs.
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A SAN provides significant benefits in terms of storage management, data availability and disaster recovery capability.
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Cost benefit analysis should be used to demonstrate benefits over the lifetime of the equipment, potentially 5 years, for example.
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Maximising benefits realisation will require buy-in from all areas of the HE/FE institution – it is not just a solution for the institution’s computing service, particularly in distributed environments.
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Deployment of a SAN has strong strategic fit with most HE/FE institutions’ desires to support new patterns of learning (e-learning, lifelong learning, widened participation, for example) by supporting24x7 availability and reduced “data downtime”.
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It will also prove to be a key tool in compliance with security and disaster recovery audit requirements.
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As of late 2003, the procurement, installation and configuration of SANs is a highly complex andlengthy exercise with many unexpected interoperability problems, so achieving the benefits will be achallenge!
2.0Introduction
Many organisations, including those in the HE/FE sector are finding that storage growth is increasing at analarming rate and, when combined with a trend to require more servers to support storage, is leading to anunmanageable situation as far as storage management is concerned. The growth of distributed systems is alsogiving concern in many organisations as standards of support in a devolved environment are not alwaysadequate. Consequently, consolidation of both servers and storage is looking very attractive. Networked storage solutions (of which SANs and NAS are examples – see below) can offer increased flexibilityfor connecting storage, ensuring much greater utilisation of disk storage space and support for server consolidation (as storage and server capacity growth trends are no longer linked).Installing a SAN is large and complicated undertaking, needing institutional management commitment and ismore suited to environments where a large proportion of the institution’s data will reside on the SAN. NAS can provide “plug and go” solutions for file serving, but SANs are better able to support large corporate databasesand provide enhanced resilience.
3.0The Technology
3.1Defining the Storage Technology: DAS, SAN, NAS
Traditionally, data storage resides on hard disks that are locally attached to individual servers. This is known asDirect Attached Storage (DAS). Although this storage may now be large (in the order of 100s of Gigabytes of data storage per server) the storage is generally only accessible from the server to which it is attached. As such,much of this disk space remains unused and plenty of ‘contingency’ has to be built into storage needs whendetermining server specification. In addition, if the server were to fail, access to the data held on those localdisks is generally lost.A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a separate “network” dedicated to storage devices and at minimum consistsof one (or more) large banks of disks mounted in racks that provide for ‘shared’ storage space which isaccessible by many servers/systems. Other devices, such as robotic tape libraries may be attached to the SAN.See Figure 1 for a representation of both DAS and SAN storage. Network Attached Storage (NAS) is storage that sits on the ordinary network (or LAN) and is accessible bydevices (servers and workstations) attached to that LAN. NAS devices provide access to file systems and assuch are effectively file server appliances. Delivery of file systems is most commonly via NFS (Network FileSystem) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocols, but others may be used e.g. NCP (NetWare CorePage 3 of 21
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