Components of a SAN

It is imperative to keep the design of your SAN as simple as possible says Gavin Rosenberg of Sunstar Company. The simpler the design, the more likely it is to work satisfactorily bearing in mind that most SANS are both flexible and scalable,meaning it's easy to go back and make modifications, add links and switches at a later time if so desired.

The components of a basic SAN is limited to a small number of components, however the options within are plentiful!

The Fibre Channel Switch, the intelligence of the SAN is the key component. When deciding on a switch, look to hardware redundancy within the switch, port count; the building blocks of your SAN usually start at 8 ports and consider a switch that you can add ports on a need be basis. The number of ports you need will depend on your choice of single or dual-attached hosts and storage devices. Switches should offer a wide variety of easy-to-use, Web-based management and monitoring tools to meet a variety of needs. Switches should offer software that protects your SAN from security breaches as well as software that enables secure sharing of storage resources across your SAN. Mr. Rosenberg suggests that you purchase a switch from one of the major manufacturers as integrating with third-party applications is usually cleaner, and well tested prior to your installation and thus conforming to industry standards. Purchase the fastest switch available, they are backward compatible and certainly look to your budget. Bearing in mind that with SANs you can easily "pay-as-you-grow," so purchase the best features you can afford now and expand when your business demands it.

There are many types of disk and tape storage devices available that meet a wide range of storage requirements. Make sure the devices are Fibre Channel ready and determine if your enviroment needs Fibre, SAS, SCSI, SATA or a combination of drive arrays. Integrating a variety of devices into your SAN allows you to allocate storage based upon cost, availability, and performance criteria. If critical application data is stored on a device, you'll want to have that device dual-attached to your fabric to ensure high availability. That requires double the number of Fibre Channel connections on that device

The applications that will run on your SAN should help drive what type of Host Bus Adapters (HBA’s) you need on your hosts. From the available 4 Gbit/sec, 2 Gbit/sec, and auto-sensing speeds, choose the speed needed to match your current and future data throughput requirements. Consider dual-attached HBA’s to your fabric to ensure high availability.

Your choice of cabling boils down to either optical or copper. Copper and optical are the two primary types of media used for the physical cabling between the components of your SAN. While copper is less expensive, most cabling installations are optical, providing a reliable signal over a longer distance.

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