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SAN Consolidation
As part of the firm's storage vision and in keeping with the corporate philosophy of streamlined and consolidated operations, in 2003, the team decided to tighten up the storage infrastructure by moving the SAN islands to consolidated datacenter SANs.The team chose the Cisco Systems MDS 9509 Multilayer Director for the consolidated SAN architecture. The team replaced the SAN islands with two dual-fabric SANs per production datacenter, each built on two MDS 9509s. A fifth MDS 9509 resides in the development datacenter and is used for testing firmware upgrades and for simulating changes to virtual SANs (VSANs) in production. Through the use of VSANs, the team can simulate all production environments on the one development switch.In addition to VSAN technology, one of the key factors behind choosing the Cisco solution is the support it provides for multiple platforms in one box. The team already uses Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) over a T3 connection for database archive log shipment between the primary and secondary datacenters, and believes that the widespread use of iSCSI for additional SAN extensions is not far off. With the price of FC HBAs decreasing, however, the team feels that the urgent need to deploy iSCSI has diminished somewhat. Having the ability to utilize multiple transport protocols in the same chassis offers significant investment protection, regardless of the final decision.Although the initial costs of investing in SAN technology were higherparticularly in terms of the learning curve for the support staffthe team contends that over time the strategy has proven sound. Subsequent increases in management efficiencies have made up for the costs associated with deploying the new technology. Because the deployment of storage networks at this firm is still relatively young, hard numbers indicating the exact scale of the improvements are still forthcoming. Some immediate benefits of storage networking are readily apparent, however:The process of storage provisioning has been simplified.Utilization rates, as expected, have increased.Management costs related to storage support have decreased.
Currently, the technology support team does not have dedicated storage managers. To support 60 TB of storage, two UNIX systems administrators act as virtual storage managers and spend approximately 40 percent of their time on storage. The leadership team is in the process of centralizing the management of storage, which might lead to the creation of a dedicated storage team. The team cautions, however, that the operational efficiencies gained through the use of storage networks decreases the need for a large team of people focused solely on storage.
