Virtualisation - Storage

A SAN infrastructure will traditionally be an initial choice of vendor based upon performance and cost of their current product range at the time of purchase, whilst this market place is very competitive this often leads to a low cost initial implementation with a high cost expansion as additional purchases of storage have to be from the same vendor to maintain compatibility. As the storage requirements in all organisations are growing at exponential rates this initial decision is a very important one, under valued by many organisations implementing an initial SAN.

ANS provide both single SAN vendor virtualisation to ensure that there is a single supplier and therefore single support and maintenance contract and also multiple SAN vendor virtualisation.

By virtualising the SAN disks from any vendor the intelligence and therefore the software layer is removed from the disk level storage and placed in the switch layer. There are several advantages to this type of approach.

Multiple storage units can be purchased from any vendor at any time and presented as one single logical unit to be presented to the servers at the virtualisation layer.

• There is one interface to manage all storage requirements regardless of location or manufacture of the storage.
• Any storage existing or acquired through merger can be added to the overall available SAN storage.
• Disks are purchased as basic disks without additional software which is traditionally where storage vendors will increase the costs of a SAN solution .
• Snapshot, CDP, replication, mirroring, ISCSI and FC are all available across all storage that is virtualised along with the ability to present snapshots to backup servers and replicate DAS storage directly to the SAN for remote offices.
• Replication is achieved over an IP connection without the requirement for expensive FC to IP converters as both protocols are available by default.

By virtualising through a single vendor the following advantages

• Single point of support for all storage
• Automatic load balancing across multiple SAN units to increase performance, scalability, and availability
• Automatic snapshot management and replication between sites
• Simple volume management
• thin provisioning providing the ability to over provision and take away the initial volume sizing problems and future expansion issues
• Automatic tiering of storage and pooling with dynamic reallocation of data within the SAN to provide the best performance