Table Of ContentBuilding Storage Networks
by Marc Farley
Osborne/McGraw-Hill © 2000 , 590 pages
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Building Storage Networks
Dedication
About the Author
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
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Part I: Introduction to Network Storage
Chapter 1: The Network Storage Landscape
Chapter 2: Piecing Together a Path for Storage I/O
Chapter 3: Charting the I/O Path from Application to Storage in Client/Server Networks
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Part II: Established Applications in Network Storage
Chapter 4: Disk Mirroring for Data Protection, Availability, and Performance
Chapter 5: Enhancing Performance with Caching and other Techniques
Chapter 6: Boosting Availability and Performance with RAID and Disk Subsystems
Chapter 7: Network Backup: The Foundation of Storage Management
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Part III: Network Access to Storage
Chapter 8: Comparing SAN and NAS Technologies
Chapter 9: SAN Designs
Chapter 10: Building Better Backup Systems with SANs
Chapter 11: Fibre Channel Networking Technology for Storage Networks
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Part IV: Network Attached Storage Devices and Other Advanced Topics
Chapter 12: Plug and Play Storage with NAS
Chapter 13: Distributing Intelligence and Data Sharing in the SAN
Chapter 14: Accessing Data on S/390 MVS Mainframes from a SAN
Chapter 15: Clustered Storage and I/O Directions
Chapter 16: Storing and Retrieving Data on the Internet
Building Storage Networks
Marc Farley
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wife Gretchen and my children Laura and Bret. May we
continue to share our experiences, talents, and blessings for a long, long time.
About the Author
Marc Farley started working with network storage technology in 1991 at Palindrome Corporation as
a systems engineer and has been in the network storage field ever since working in business
development, product management, and strategic marketing at Hitachi, Crossroads Systems, and
ConvergeNet. He is currently the Vice President of Marketing at SanCastle Technologies, a
company designing and building Gigabit networking switching fabrics.
Foreword
While Storage Area Networks offer great promise in solving the growing information management
challenges of corporations, the process of choosingsolutions in this rapidly evolving market can be
daunting. Few corporations have the in-house expertise to navigate the sea of options alone. From
components through clustering, Marc Farley's book, Building Storage Networks, offers a
comprehensive guidebook for understanding and evaluating the options for storage networks.
Storage Traditions, Trends, and Trials
Traditional approaches to storage and storage management emphasize the need to control
expense and restrict access. Using traditional storage management principles, the amount of
information stored is significantly limited, even to the point of reducing a date field to two digits. At
the same time, information access is often restricted to a single server.
Recent advances in recording technology now make it possible to store vast quantities of data at
relatively low cost. New applications and new business models brought on by the network era are
increasing the demands on corporations to share information both internally and with their partners
and customers. The challenge for companies is no longer the cost of storing data, but finding ways
to cost effectively manage vast storage resources and provide access to data so that it can be
turned into valuable information.
Even as the amount of storage continues to grow, skilled storage managers remain in short supply.
This combination of growing data, the need for information access, and the lack of management
resources has driven the demand for a new class of storage solutions called Storage Area
Networks (SANs). These solutions promise support for the broadest range of server platforms,
operating systems and applications, with virtually limitless scale in terms of capacity, connectivity,
performance, and availability.
Building Storage Area Networks
Storage area networks are an evolving technology that offers immediate benefits today. Storage
area networks facilitate storage and server consolidation and non-disruptive backup, while
eliminating many of the distance limitations of earlier technologies. In addition, when compared to
many legacy technologies, SANs will offer significantly improved application performance.
Ending 1999, few examples exist of enterprise-wide SANs; however, industry groups are working
aggressively to eliminate the interoperability challenges of early SAN implementations and deliver
a broad range of SAN-enabled storage and information management applications. These
companies understand that an enterprise storage area network solution must significantly simplify
or completely automate the mundane and repetitive tasks associated with storage management.
At a minimum, the solution must support a broad range of server platforms and operating systems,
including legacy servers that support back-office operations, thus freeing the storage manager
from concerns regarding compatibility.
The solution must also provide scaleable capacity, performance, and availability. While every user
may state they require the highest level of availability or performance, not every user will be willing
to pay for it. Thus, the solution must provide the flexibility to deliver a "class of service."
The solution must also offer self-management capabilities, especially with respect to error
recovery, data availability, and performance management. Error correction and the ability to
recover from component failures are critical attributes of any enterprise storage solution. RAID
protection frees the storage manager from concerns over data loss resulting from a hard disk drive
failure, for example. Automated load balancing reduces the management requirements of storage
administrators.
Data replication and data movement capabilities are of increasing significance. An enterprise SAN
solution facilitates the exchange of information between disparate applications either through data
replication, data sharing, or data movement. In addition, the enterprise SAN solution must provide
the ability to copy data between storage systems, both locally and remotely, both synchronously
and asynchronously, to facilitate cost effective application recovery and disaster tolerance. Finally,
the enterprise SAN solution must provide the ability to deliver near-instantaneous, transient copies
of data to reduce application downtime for tape backups, application testing, and other scheduled
and unscheduled activities that impinge on the ultimate goal of continuous application, system, and
data availability.
Growth and the Impact on Staffing
The explosive growth of storage has led to a storage management challenge of critical proportion.
Each application and server requires more data, and thus more storage. Each application may
have unique storage requirements. Storage managers, then, are often left with the challenge of
managing a broad range of storage solutions, each with different management tools. Even as the
complexity of computing increases with the expanding breadth of critical applications, the
availability of skilled IT resources to manage these environments remains in short supply. In fact,
one of the leading challenges for CIOs today is finding and retaining skilled IT staff.
Leading storage providers, however, are bringing to market a new class of solutions. These
solutions provide a storage infrastructure that can be centrally managed yet shared between
multiple servers and applications. They also facilitate the movement and sharing of information
between discrete applications. Through centralized management, the cost of management can be
dramatically decreased. More importantly, however, the ability to quickly respond to changes in
capacity or performance requirements is also significantly enhanced. Through use of an enterprise
storage solution, companies can more effectively utilize their existing staff and through the
intelligence of the new solutions, free their staff to focus on the strategic issues of application value
rather than the mundane and repetitive issues of data availability, capacity planning, and
performance management.
Integrated Approaches Drive Data Sharing
Massive increases in connectivity stand as one of the most significant changes to occur in
corporate information systems. Increasingly, legacy accounting systems are linked with sales order
processing, inventory systems, and billing systems to improve efficiency and enable the support of
dramatic increases in transaction volume. This has resulted in a substantial increase in the need to
move and share data between systems.
More important, however, is the increased integration and connectivity between corporations and
their community of suppliers and customers. Historically, companies strove to manage risk by
restricting access to systems and protecting valuable information. Companies now recognize that
there exists an even greater risk in failing to provide the broader community with access to
systems and information.
In an Internet world, infrastructures that previously took years to build must be built over night. And
for companies that are adding an Internet, e-commerce strategy to a legacy delivery model, the
challenges are even greater. These companies must tightly integrate Internet systems with legacy
systems or risk damaging the existing brand.
