The idea is to relieve network congestion or bypass distance limitations imposed by traditional SCSI storage connections. They can be local or remote, spanning campuses and using wide-area connections. They recommend implementing small, simple FCAL or switched fabric networks to share data among servers. Lee Congdon, senior vice president of strategic integration and architecture for NASD in New York. For example, data replication and creating multiple active copies of data that would increase utilization or ease maintenance and testing operations.
Users also recommend dividing applications into categories based on importance.
For mission-critical application data, users need to design in redundancy and fault tolerance with duplicated storage, switches and host bus adapters, so there is no single point of failure. Prepare for future Not surprisingly, users have implemented SANs in different ways, but most are preparing for future growth. For example, Congdon's switched fabric SAN will be able to easily expand as he adds more applications. The Motley Fool and Home Depot use FCAL and will need to migrate to a switched fabric architecture before they can add any more servers, clients or applications to their SANs. Users agree, though, that relying on a systems vendor or integrator for your first SAN implementation is the wise route.