What is SAN [Storage Area Networks]?

A SAN or Storage Area Networks is a high performance storage network that transfers data between servers and storage devices and is separate network from LANs or WANs. It is used to connect all storage resources to various servers. Storage devices such as NAS, RAID, tape libraries or disk arrays are connected to servers using Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel is a highly reliable, gigabit interconnect technology that enables simultaneous communication among workstations, mainframes, servers, data storage systems and other peripherals.

A SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to servers on a LAN or WAN. These storage devices can be accessible from any server in the larger network.

Who should use SAN

As stated above a SAN makes all your storage device connected together through a centralized storage network, rather than buying large servers with tons of internal disk space, a SAN would make sense for your company.

Better disk utilization

SAN gives you ability to manage storage resources at network level and assign that storage more intelligently to the servers that need it.

Better Disaster Recovery solution

If you have mission critical applications running on Servers then you definitely need a SAN as you can't afford server to go down.

Multiple Critical Applications

SAN networks are used most often by organizations that have a lot of data that needs to be accessed quickly.

More flexibility

One of the main features of SAN network is flexibility, Because it is made of different storage devices, it can perform tasks away from the servers involved. This means that SAN hard drives can communicate with each other and perform routine backups or updates without taking up bandwidth or accessing outside servers at all.

Who does not require SAN

A SAN may make sense for your company only if you have trained IT staff, budget and mission critical applications running. If your storage requirements fall in one of the following categories, then you may not require SAN.

Only have a single application

If you have a single application running SAN shall not be recommended.

Only have few Servers

Main benefit of SAN comes from centralized storage management. You may gain speed and reliability benefits from SAN for few servers, but the cost shall not be justifiable.