12 Storage Area Network Advantages That Will Make Your IT Team Smile
Over time, your company and its data and infrastructure demands increase. If your reporting and data analytics processes are hampered by inadequate data accessibility, availability, and protection, it may be time to review your storage architecture.
One of the most promising technologies within storage subsystems is Storage Area Networks (SANs) that provide high availability and scalability within the scope of data storage and retrieval, As an IT specialist you will probably enjoy its numerous benefits.
Let’s learn about 12 storage area network advantages that will make your it team smile.
1. Reaching Towards the Future, Which You Have Visualised
Like with virtualization, the scalability of SANs is not disrupted because it allows for the modification of infrastructure as much as needed. Through servers linked with high-speed fiber channels to pools of storage arrays, the resources will be available to meet a certain demand. The SAN storage is capable of increasing storage capacity proportionally with the servers themselves when using virtualization technology.
2. Ensuring Data Accessibility for Users Even During A Disaster
Due to calamities, improper electrical supply, and a lot more, downtime comes knocking and stops the process. SANs provide numerous features to ensure that application and data accessibility will be at their optimum no matter what the life event is. With different possibilities for data paths, site replication, snapshots, clones, and disk mirroring, your apps have an opportunity to access the requisite data even in cases when the unexpected happens.
3. Improving Performance for High-Critical Workloads with Time To Spare
When app use is largely transactional and needs quick access to data, then SANs work wonders. I find that fiber channel connections are capable of creating isolated paths for storage traffic and other network traffic to flow; thus enabling data to move at high speeds between the servers and storage devices. The operation of your SQL Server databases, virtual desktops, and customer-facing applications depends on responsiveness. Thereby, with SANs, latency is eliminated while the performance of the system is improved.
4. Consolidating Management to De-Operatorise The IT Operations
The multidimensionality and growing size of infrastructure call for effective methods to address them as they become increasingly challenging to manage. SANs build the architecture that enshrines the concept of centralized and simplified storage management.
The storage resources are not directly related or connected to storage siloes but are grouped under central control and management software. It enables your IT administrators to manage capacity, availability, performance, data protection, and many other factors that concern the systems from a central point.
5. Protecting Your Data Assets by Enhancing the Security Controls in Place
We live in a world where threats are present at every turn in this all-important area of data security. The apps and workloads generate high-value data that need protection to avoid being leaked or exposed in some way. SANstorage provides end-to-end security features such as; Encryption, access control, data masking, Backups that reside in different air gaps, lockdown mode for preventing malicious access during a cyber attack, and much more. With this aspect, you can be assured your data is safe from unauthorized access.
6. Storage Consolidation
Server sprawl is responsible for the inefficient use of storage and results in stranded capacity and resource islands. By using SAN, large storage systems are pooled into centralized resource pools and the utilization of all available storage space is thus optimized. Excess capacity is not fully utilized but can be recovered and made available to areas requiring its use. And, because there is less hardware, there are fewer devices to rack, stack, power, cool, and maintain which translates to significantly lower costs and physical space.
7. Preparing for Exponential Data Growth Without Fear
Every day, as firms expand to cater to large numbers of customers and markets, data increases in size more than expected. SAN storage provides nearly infinite expandability to deal with your increasing amounts of data while simultaneously providing the performance you require. While capacity and bandwidth are scaled out they can scale gradually depending on the number of disks, flash drives, controllers, interfaces, or network links that are added.
8. Efficient Solution and Approach to Data Backup, Recovery, and Archival
As we all understand, almost no IT activities demand the amount of resources that data protection and retention do. It costs a lot to keep up with the ever-increasing, and exponentially growing data volume, and to maintain off-site backup repositories, not to mention the challenges of managing intricate disaster recovery processes. SANs significantly simplify these via built-in data services such as snapshots, replication, disaster recovery copy sets, and smooth integration to cloud or object storage tiers once data cools.
9. Future-Proofed by Upgrading Efficiently as Technology Advances
It is trite knowledge that nothing goes as fast as technology and storage infrastructure cannot be an exception to this rule. To meet the growing workloads, you incorporate flash drives as your storage devices demand flash storage.
Even if you later deploy another AI/ML solution requiring GPUs near the data, processing can be moved closer to the SAN storage layer. When there is an introduction of faster throughput such as a 32/64Gbit fiber channel then there is a possibility to upgrade the interconnection of SAN without affecting service. In this way, as new tech emerges into the market, SANs adapt themselves seamlessly to the new technology.
10. Transitioning Confidently to Hyperconverged or Cloud Models
This is particularly pertinent as strategic plans shift to HCI or hybrid cloud, for how storage fits in can make or break plans. They also map directly to storage layers in SAN and play the part of a distributed shared data layer to connect HCI nodes. High-quality data services, which are inherent in SAN platforms, perform storage processes within the interaction with the public cloud through the cooperation of capabilities and providers.
11. Getting Maximum Value Out of The IT Investments
It is not a good feeling to generalize that we have to start from scratch when it comes to forklift infrastructure upgrades. The flexibility of storage enables you to adopt the current server, networking, and storage infrastructure and connect it to the updated architecture. One can also re-allocate high-performance fiber channel SANusing Ethernet-based leveraging davit that one already owns. This helps in getting the maximum value for the money invested in IT assets while at the same time preparing for the future.
12. Lightening Your IT Team’s Workload While Bringing on the Smiles
As we can see even the best infrastructures need an experienced approach. These solutions come with communication paths between your devices and vendors providing support running telemetry data in parallel. It thus allows proactive support to be provided, while minimizing the time required to solve issues should they occur, as well as enabling the achievement of service level agreements for mission-critical applications based on the environment. I think that your IT team has a lot on its plate already, and it does not need to spend its time worrying about storage.
Final Thoughts
As the business moves forward towards further growth, technologies like SAN storage can enable data infrastructures necessary for your undertakings at the present and in the future. Considering such pros in performance, availability, scalability, efficiency, data protection, and Ctot, could well make your IT team smile about SAN solutions. You should therefore evaluate your needs and strategic plan to decide whether it is now appropriate to adopt the flexibility of Storage Area Networks as the new foundation of business data you require for your organization.
