How do I know if I'm ready for a SAN?
Do you consider 50 GB of data large enough to implement a SAN? Is any amount of data too small to implement a SAN?

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Only implement a SAN when you find the cost savings of implementing a SAN outweigh the costs of staying with current practices.

A SAN will help with things like:

  • Disaster recovery
  • Storage utilization
  • Backup
  • Data management
  • Storage operations
  • Clustering
  • Server consolidation
  • Utility/GRID computing
  • Capacity on demand
  • Regulatory issues
  • Data archiving
  • If you have none of these issues, then perhaps a SAN is not required.

    Chris

    Editor's note: Do you agree with this expert's response? If you have more to share, post it in one of our .bphAaR2qhqA^0@/searchstorage>discussion forums.

    The views and opinions expressed by Christopher L. Poelker are his alone and not necessarily shared by Hitachi Data Systems.

    This was first published in May 2004