Without question, storage area networks (SANs) offer much better I/O performance than local storage. Work with your SAN vendor to ensure that the final product provides optimal performance and reliability.
SANs are economical for large, enterprise storage needs -- rather than local-attached storage (i.e., internal hard drives, external RAID arrays and so on) -- and they offer high performance, high reliability and fast backups and restores. Local storage is swiftly moving to obsolescence in the enterprise, but it will live on for smaller shops, smaller applications or disaster-recovery sites.
For instance, one large publishing conglomerate uses SANs for its data centers and local storage (RAID arrays) for its disaster-recovery sites, as it only has short-term storage requirements at the disaster-recovery site. The disaster-recovery site doubles as a development/QA environment as well.
Hilary Cotter Hilary Cotter has been involved in IT for more than 20 years as a Web and database consultant. Microsoft first awarded Cotter the Microsoft SQL Server MVP award in 2001. Cotter received his bachelor of applied science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Toronto and studied economics at the University of Calgary and computer science at UC Berkeley. He is the author of a book on SQL Server transactional replication and is currently working on books on merge replication and Microsoft search technologies.
Copyright 2006TechTarget
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