Because SAN technology is relatively new and continues to evolve rapidly, you can plan and deploy a complete SAN solution to accommodate future growth and emerging SAN technologies. Ultimately, SAN technology will allow connectivity between heterogeneous systems with different operating systems to storage products from multiple vendors. Currently, SAN solutions are best for large companies and for IT departments that need to store large amounts of data. A minimal deployment of a typical SAN solution might hold as much as 5 terabytes of data. In terms of availability, no other single solution has the potential to offer the comprehensive and flexible reliability that a vendor-supported SAN provides.
Some companies can expect enormous revenue loss when messaging services are down.
If your company has the potential to lose significant revenue if the messaging service is unavailable, it could be cost-effective to deploy a specialized SAN solution. Before you invest in a SAN, calculate the cost of your current storage solution in terms of hardware and administrative resources, and evaluate the company's need for dependable storage. Typically, messages stored in the SMTP queue are there for a short time. Therefore, your storage solution for the SMTP queue should optimize performance before capacity and reliability. However, in some situations, when downstream processes fail, the SMTP queue could be required to store a large amount of data.