What to do when installing a SAN

Good afternoon Christopher,

I'll try to make this a brief as possible. My company is thinking of installing a SAN, implementing several SUNFire 6800 systems and attaching them to a tape storage facility with an additional tape backup. As the network representative on the project I have been asked to spec a switch that will interface with the different hardware components and our WAN clients.

I have been thinking along the lines of the CISCO 5000 to 6509 groups but maybe this is not necessary or total overkill. What do you think?

Also, where can I find existing network diagrams that would give me a "picture" of what an entry level SAN would look like.

Thank you in advance for any assistance or information you can give me. I really appreciate your site.

Regards
Craig

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Any 10/100Mb switch should do fine for the WAN clients. For the servers, I would rather you connect the tape subsystem via a "data router" (Fibre to SCSI bridge) to the fabric so SAN based "LAN free" backups could be routed via the SAN to tape.

All the major backup software vendors or tape library vendors can help you implement this. Sun can also help and would, in your case, be the best place to go since you are using their servers. Ask them about "LAN free" and "server free" backup solutions.

As far as finding a basic San diagram to see what it looks like for the backup solution, go to: http://www.brocade.com/san/solutionware-server-free.jhtml

And, for a basic SAN whitepaper and diagram stuff, go to: http://www.hds.com/pdf/BearStearnsStore5_01.pdf

Chris

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This was first published in January 2002