Background - Most organizations start their IT operations with a handful of critical business servers. Each of these servers often has its own internal hard drives or disk arrays using built-in RAID controllers. Administrators create several volumes on each of these servers for the operating system, applications, and application data.
The Case for Unified IP Storage - As the organization grows, volumes rapidly begin to run out of available space. Performance degrades until the hard drives themselves run out of capacity. Adding new hard drives to the servers involves costly downtime, and monitoring capacity on a server-by-server basis complicates storage management. Replacing hard drives in the event of a failure can be tedious and impair daily business activities. Meanwhile, storage is trapped behind individual servers, reducing utilization rates and resulting in wasted capacity. Storage consolidation with a SAN can alleviate these pains, but the choice up until now has been cost-prohibitive Fibre Channel-based solutions that require specialized personnel to implement and manage.
Problems Solved - Moving to an IP SAN provides all of your servers with one centralized pool of network storage made up of Nimbus Breeze systems. Breeze systems are fully fault-tolerant with hot-swappable components, ensuring that no single component failure results in a loss of access. Using a simple web-based interface, IT personnel can now dynamically create logical volumes and allocate storage to servers as needs change without disrupting operations. If a server fails, an IT administrator can instantly reassign its logical volumes to a standby server. Nimbus software allows volumes to be expanded on-the-fly, and robust security controls ensure that only permitted servers access their volumes. Organizations can expand their storage infrastructure on-demand without facing downtime. Even as additional servers are added in the future, storage administration remains centralized to one intuitive interface. |
