What are some best practices when it comes to designing a SAN?

What are some best practices when it comes to designing a SAN?

First, design for growth. Next, design for maintenance, which may include adding new software, making firmware revisions, upgrading hardware, replacing technologies and so on. Plan for diagnostic capabilities -- it's important to gain insights into the storage network -- know what is normal and abnormal. Remove unnecessary complexity, which can often remove costs. Implement sound and practical naming conventions for key items like switch ports and storage devices. Implement applicable security and defenses to match the threats for your environment, including business continuance and disaster recovery. Implement solid change control and change management practices, which is where most network problems come from. Implement network segmentation to isolate network traffic and keep local traffic local. Segmentation can also ease troubleshooting by reducing a problem's impact on the entire network.

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This was first published in January 2007

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