Common mistakes
IDC's Penn suggests companies often try to do too much too soon. He also cites under investing as another common mistake. "Overlooking the fact that something can go wrong is also an issue," he warns. "Because when it does, customer dissent grows very quickly."
Storage Tek's Templeton believes one of the common mistakes companies doing business online make is taking a piecemeal approach to storage. He says they associate storage with specific applications, rather than looking broadly across the environment to see where efficiencies and economies of scale can be found.
He believes if companies consolidate resources across their whole environment, it can help them reduce their storage management costs.
Nor are technologies such as SAN and NAS either-or solutions.
Storage vendor Veritas' senior systems engineer Simon Elisha says that they co-exist because certain problems can be assisted by using those technologies. "What I mean broadly is that if you're looking at...a high performance application that needs storage allocated to it--such as databases, e-mail--typically we see customers put in a SAN infrastructure."
He says this is because SANs are optimised for high-performance storage. Moving data over a network is very processor intensive, which can lead to performance bottlenecks. SAN and fibre channel hardware offload processing from the host on to the storage network, which shifts data at an optimum rate for storage, while leaving the host processor to serve applications.
For applications such as streaming media, Elisha sees SANs as a good option.
There are also emerging standards, like iSCSI, which involve moving data over IP networks.
NAS, Elisha believes, is useful when you want to do heavy duty file serving. He says often businesses will have to put in a separate dedicated network for the NAS, if they're shifting decent amounts of data. One of the benefits he sees of NAS is that it's easy to plug in and get going quickly, because it's an appliance. However, the downside is that it can be inflexible.
Hi,
Outside the operational and IO aspects, there are also costs associated with all these technologies. I thought readers may also want to check out an article which discusses Costs associated with SAN and DAS.
http://capitalhead.com/articles/san-vs-das-a-cost-analysis-of-storage-in-the-enterprise.aspx
- Mike