Module 5: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network
Module
–
5
Fibre Channel Storage
Area Network (FC SAN)
1
Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved
Module 5: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network
This module focuses on FC SAN components, FC interconnectivity
options, and FC
architecture. This module also focuses on virtualization techniques in SAN environment.
2
Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved
Module 5: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network
This lesson covers evolution of FC SAN, its components, and three FC interconnectivity
options. This lesson also covers various FC port types.
3
Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved
Module 5: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network
Organizations are experiencing an explosive growth in information. This information needs to
be stored, protected, optimized, and managed efficiently. Data center managers are
burdened with the challenging task of providing low-cost, high-performance information
management solutions. An effective information management solution must provide the
following:
Just-in-time information to business users:
Information must be available to business users
when they need it. 24 x 7 data availability is becoming one of the key requirements of
today’s storage infrastructure. The explosive growth in online storage, proliferation of new
servers and applications, and the spread of mission-critical data throughout enterprises are
some of the challenges that need to be addressed to provide information availability in real
time.
Flexible and resilient storage infrastructure:
The storage infrastructure must provide
flexibility and resilience that aligns with changing business requirements. Storage should
scale without compromising the performance requirements of applications and, at the same
time, the total cost of managing information must be low.
Direct-attached storage (DAS) is often referred to as a stovepiped storage environment.
Hosts “own” the storage and it is difficult to manage and share resources on these isolated
storage devices. Efforts to organize this dispersed data led to the emergence of the storage
area network (SAN).
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Copyright © 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved
Module 5: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network
SAN is a high-speed, dedicated network of servers and shared storage devices. It enables
storage consolidation and allows storage to be shared across multiple servers. This improves
the utilization of storage resources compared to direct-attached storage architecture and
reduces the total amount of storage an organization needs to purchase and manage.
With
consolidation, storage management becomes centralized and less complex, which further
reduces the cost of managing information. SAN also enables organizations to connect
geographically dispersed servers and storage. Further, it meets the storage demands
efficiently with better economies of scale and also provides effective maintenance and
protection of data.
