Article

Reasons for scaling beyond a single fabric

Greg Schulz

Reasons for scaling a storage network beyond a single fabric on a local or wide-area basis include:

  • Consolidation of servers, storage, backup, applications and data centers.
  • Data protection and business continuance, including regulatory compliance.
  • Technology replacement combined with business growth and new application needs.
  • Ability to support more devices than a single fabric can support.
  • Isolation and segregation of workloads, applications and customers.
  • Interoperability and coexistence of heterogeneous technologies.
Understanding your storage networking objectives, along with what level of scalability and resiliency you require, is integral to developing your storage network design. Attributes and service requirements associated with scaling a storage network include:
  • Performance (bandwidth and latency) including lack of congestion.
  • Support for more servers and storage devices for growth.
  • Support for backup, recovery and business continuance.
  • Block access, file access (

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  • NAS), or combination of block and NAS access.
  • Ease of management, diagnostics and provisioning of resources.
  • Span distances to maintain data accessibility on a local and regional basis.
Learn about possible architectures for scaling beyond a single fabric.

Read this tip from the beginning.

About the author: Greg Schulz is a senior analyst with the independent storage analysis firm, The Evaluator Group Inc. Greg has 25 years of IT experience as a consultant, end user, storage and storage networking vendor, and industry analyst. Greg has worked with Unix, Windows, IBM Mainframe, OpenVMS and other hardware/software environments. In addition to being an analyst, Greg is also the author and illustrator of Resilient Storage Networks, Greg has contributed material to Storage Magazine. Greg holds both a computer science and software engineering degree from the University of St. Thomas.

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