Storage Area Networks (SANs)

Storage Area Networks (SANs) are more common in a medium to large company.SANs vary greatly in reliability, performance, and cost, and are beyond the scope of this document.SAN vendors commonly use the term IOPs (Input Output Per second) to describe the performance of the raw disks of their hardware.In a hardware sales process, customers want to know the following information:

• How many IOPs does my Customer Interaction Center server require?

• How many IOPs should my SQL Server be able to do?

Be careful using a vendor’s claimed IOPs number for comparison purposes.Once you factor in Fibre Channel or iSCSI encapsulation, the virtualization layer, operating system, and application, it will be less than what is advertised with raw hardware.VMware does allow for a minimal reservation of IOPs per guest.

SANs offer much more flexibility and can be a good part of a disaster recovery plan.Depending on the vendor, there may be some excellent monitoring tools for making sure that the guests are not overwhelming the storage.Operations such as guest transfers, deployments, and cloning can potentially cause problems for other guests running and depending on the SAN.SANs can be more complicated than a local storage solution.