SAN Storage Briefing

Our most popular Storage Area Network (SAN) Storage briefing was recently updated (April 2009) to reflect the most recent SPC performance data and now we have added Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance results. This briefing helps you to understand SAN storage solutions, functions, features, software and management and their impact on fiber channel (FC) data storage use. Specifically the briefing covers

- How storage RAID level, disk drives, subsystem caching algorithms, and storage subsystem sophistication impact SAN storage subsystems,
- How to understand and tune SAN RAID storage performance to better support your application environment
- How to use FC storage features such as snapshot and data replication facilities to support data center backup and disaster recovery
- How to analyze and compare SAN storage appliance benchmark performance results to purchase better data storage

Over the years, we have given a number of presentations, podcasts and articles on storage devices, features and performance. Many of them including an article on Pump-up Array Performance article, presentations, and a 4-part podcast are available in our document archives for free download.

This briefing is for the storage administrator seeking an introduction to FC SAN storage or a tutorial on SAS, SATA or SAN storage technology, features and performance. It is also for those admins who are faced with managing their primary or secondary data storage arrays to get the most out of their SAN storage investment. As such, it can be used to bring up to speed new administrators as well as refresh the concepts and techniques of storage management and performance tuning for more experienced storage adminitrators. Finally if you are looking to understand why one would deploy SAN over NAS storage please also look to purchase both our NAS briefing and this SAN Storage briefing.

About the briefing:
- 31 pages
- For a summary of this briefing please download
SAN Storage Briefing ToC and Synopsis (PDF 288KB)
our SAN Storage Briefing Version 2.0 ToC and Synopsis section