






SAN
SAN technology saves your administrator time, make more reliable you business.STORAGE AREA NETWORKS
Simplifying data storage administration and adding flexibility
The Storage Area Network (SAN) is an architectural solution for external storage devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, optical drives) that connect to servers so that the operating system to recognize the connected resources as local. Storage area networks provide efficient storage and quick access to corporate information, which is especially important in the context of rapid information growth and a company's development.
Power3 provides design and implementation of storage area networks of any scale. Our solutions meet the requirements for scalability, configuration flexibility and satisfy the requirements of rapidly growing market. The implemented systems have such characteristics as fault tolerance and disaster recovery due to backup and remote data replication. Power3's solutions are aimed to reduce operating costs, enabling a fast return on investment of storage area networks.
The benefits of using the storage area network technology are that it simplifies storage administration and also simplifies the configuration. Since cables and disk arrays do not have to be physically transported and rewired from one server to another.
Another advantage is the ability to boot the server operating system directly from the SAN. In this configuration, you can quickly and easily replace a failed server by reconfiguring SAN so that a replacement server can be loaded from LUN of a failed server.
SANs also help to recover from failure effectively. A SAN could include a remote site with a secondary storage device. In this case, you can use replication either implemented on the level of disk array controllers, or using special hardware devices. Because WANs based on the IP protocol are common, the Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and iSCSI protocols have been developed to extend a single SAN-based network by the network facilities based on IP.
Most SANs use the SCSI protocol for communication between servers and storage devices at a bus topology. Since the SCSI protocol is not intended to form the network packets, the following low-level protocols are used while designing SANs:
• Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), transport SCSI over Fibre Channel. This is the most common protocol for the moment. There is in options of 1Gbit/s, 2Gbit/s, 4Gbit/s, 8Gbit/s and 10Gbit/s.
• iSCSI, transport SCSI over TCP/IP.
• FCoE, transportation FCP/SCSI over Pure Ethernet.
• FCIP and iFCP, encapsulation and transfer of FCP/SCSI over IP.
• HyperSCSI, transport SCSI over Ethernet.
• SCSI and/or TCP/IP transport over InfiniBand (IB).
The specialists of Power3 have completed specialized training and have expert qualifications which allows them to carry out the implementation of hardware from vendors such as EMC and Cisco.