.Part 1 Architecture HP SAN Design Reference Guide 785351-001
1 SAN design overview
SANs provide the data communication infrastructure for advanced, cost-efficient storage systems.
SAN technology offers investment protection, management features, and I/O price performance
to minimize capital expense. HP SAN architecture provides open network storage solutions for all
sizes and types of businesses, including small-to-medium-sized IT departments and enterprise
environments.
This chapter describes the following topics:
• “SAN solutions” (page 16)
• “HP SAN implementations” (page 17)
• “SAN components” (page 18)
• “Fibre Channel technology” (page 18)
• “Storage area networks” (page 18)
• “SAN infrastructure” (page 19)
• “Fibre Channel switches” (page 19)
• “SAN design approaches” (page 20)
• “SAN design considerations” (page 20)
SAN solutions
SANs provide flexibility in system management, configuration, connectivity, and performance to
meet the needs of the changing business environment. For the most challenging IT problems, SANs
offer resilient solutions:
• Open systems
SANs support various operating systems and servers to meet your operational requirements.
A robust storage infrastructure accommodates new business models, unexpected growth, and
corporate reorganizations.
• Fast backup and restore
SANs remove backup and recovery traffic from the LAN, reducing congestion, improving
backup windows, and efficiently utilizing storage resources. You can use centrally managed,
high-performance tape libraries to reduce backup overhead.
• Business continuance
SANs can eliminate single points of failure, incorporate failover software, and support mirroring
at geographically dispersed data centers for disaster recovery. You can quickly restore
productivity after a power failure or component downtime.
• High availability
Redundant fabric designs, storage replication, dynamic failover protection, traffic rerouting,
and server clustering enable SANs to provide enterprise-class availability to open systems
servers.
• Server and storage consolidation
Multiple servers and backup systems can share storage for efficient processing and increased
availability.
• Cost savings
SAN total cost of ownership is typically less than DAS. The business realizes a higher return
on investment because sharing storage among servers utilizes capacity more efficiently, and
16 SAN design overview