Technology News You Can Use - IP-SANs

In recent years, storage area networks (SANs) have been seen as a shining example of a new class of networked storage. This class of storage has promised everything from a more centralized, simple storage management, to dramatic reductions in backup and restore times. With their ability to allow rapid, block level transport and storage of data to a virtual storage “pool,” SANs have solved many of the issues facing today’s IT groups.

First and foremost, the establishment of the iSCSI standard for block level data transport and storage over Ethernet networks allows systems administrators to gain the many benefits of IP based SANs – while leveraging their existing skills and network infrastructures.

Today’s iSCSI SANs are designed to work closely with Windows Server 2003 storage related drivers and frameworks. Based on industry-standard, “best-of-breed” hardware and intelligent SAN/IQ software, the SAN has proven instrumental in its ability to relieve the storage management burden faced by most Microsoft Windows-based administrators.

Administrators managing dispersed, Windows-based server environments with direct-attached storage (DAS) too often find themselves in a challenging situation: Juggling system availability with storage tasks like managing backups to tape, adding capacity, or performing data restores.

As every IT Director knows, even a few minutes of downtime on their systems to accommodate storage upgrades, fix critical issues, or restore user’s data, can have a serious impact on customers and employees. The alternative for many administrators is to bring the systems down on weekends, eating into their personal time.

For systems administrators that have implemented an IP SAN solution their most common observation to report is an incredibly reduced time frame in performing storage maintenance tasks, data restores, and downtime. They are able to focus on more challenging projects that increase their organizations productivity and reduce operational costs simply because they no longer have to spend hours or even days maintaining storage or babysitting backups. The overall maintenance and upgrade time windows are now reduced to minutes.

Administrators also report that they are now able to take advantage of some of the more robust data protection and recovery features found in their iSCSI SAN, such as Snap Shots, Synchronous and Asynchronous Replication, and Remote Data Recovery Functionality.

In this issue I will discuss some of the many benefits in taking advantage of this incredible ground breaking technology. I won’t bore you with heavy technical details but rather give you an overview of the technology and how it can benefit your organization.

The first advantage to iSCSI SAN is they effectively decouple storage resources from servers, allowing them to be centrally managed in one location as a virtual storage “pool”. See Figure 1 for a comparison of direct-attached storage architectures in distributed server environments versus their iSCSI SAN counterparts.

Figure 1. Comparing DAS and iSCSI SAN architectures.

On the SAN side, what the virtual pooling capability translates into for Windows-Based system administrators is the ability to manage more than three to four times the amount of storage they used to manage – with less manual intervention required. iSCSI SANs allow data related to various application servers – such as those supporting Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server databases – to be stored and managed centrally in the virtual storage pool.

Additionally, tape drives that used to be locally attached to the servers can now work directly with the SAN and a dedicated backup server, for more streamlined and centralized backup performance and “LAN-FREE” backups.

Another feature of an iSCSI SAN is the SAN/IQ software to manage the virtual pool of storage. SAN/IQ is intelligent, distributed SAN management and clustering software that transparently manages the various standards based storage modules comprising a customer’s iSCSI SAN. Administrators use a common graphical user interface to access SAN/IQ storage management features, including the ability to provision or reallocate storage resources.

Using SAN/IQ functionality to monitor, manage, and grow centralized storage helps administrators reduce the time they used to spend babysitting their direct-attached storage systems. In many cases, administrators have reported reducing key storage tasks like backup, restores and provisioning from hours (or days) down to minutes – thanks to the simple design and straightforward interface of their IP-based SAN.

In an iSCSI SAN network there is no need to take down the application server while the administrator adjusts related back-end storage resources if you are getting close to the upper storage limit on your Microsoft Exchange information store or if you are worried that you will run out of storage space for SQL Server transactions by the end of the week.

Administrators who monitor servers with direct-attached storage have had to scramble to accommodate the voracious storage appetites of growing Exchange Message stores and key SQL Server databases. This can translate into significant time and effort spent adding or freeing up extra storage capacity for related servers. The reality of DAS environments usually amounts to over-provisioning of storage on some servers, while others continue to suffer from chronic under-provisioning.

All in all, iSCSI SANs are helping IT administrators accomplish many tasks within one simple solution. Whether you are looking to consolidate servers and storage, need a scalable storage solution, trying to minimize data loss from failures, simplify your data backups and restores, or need an affordable disaster recovery solution, iSCSI SANs can help tremendously.

Have questions? Want to see an online demo of how an iSCSI SAN can help your organization? If so, please email info@tredent.com or call our experts at

1-866-TREDENT