Technology Case Study in Storage Area Networks

Abstract

In today's world we need immediate access to data. The demand for networked data access has increased exponentially in the last 20 years. With that demand the importance and volume of networked data has also grown exponentially. The speed at which the data can be accessed has increased and with that the data has moved from individual workstations to a networked location. Over the last decade there has been a trend to move mission critical data away from individual workstations to a centralized data center. A centralized data center removes the location constraint for accessing the data. If critical data is stored on individual servers, a failure will cause the data to be inaccessible. Today, mission critical applications are spanned over multiple servers for redundancy. With this topology, having the data in a central location allows the individual servers to better work with data. With the addition of virtualization, servers can be moved online from one physical server to another. If the data is centralized, it can be presented to all hosts in the cluster. This allows servers to move efficiently between hosts without losing access to the critical data. Many businesses in various industries like finance, airline, hospital, research, etc. depend on the speed and secure availability of their centralized data to function efficiently.