With technological advancements moving at lightning speed, it’s more crucial than ever for businesses to ensure their data storage infrastructure can keep pace. Shared storage area networks (SANs) provide a high-performance solution that enables scalability, data protection, and around-the-clock accessibility—all keys to remaining competitive in today’s digital landscape.
From increased productivity and collaboration to optimized backup and recovery processes and more efficient disaster recovery planning, a cost-effective and scalable SAN offers transformative benefits that drive bottom-line growth.
This blog will explore 12 ways implementing SAN storage can turbocharge various facets of your business. Let’s dive into some of the top advantages:
1. Enhanced User Experience and Productivity
Employees expect technologies that make their work seamless and efficient. SAN storage delivers consistent, high-speed access to data wherever employees are, eliminating bottlenecks. This allows streamlined multi-user access and editing of files simultaneously, taking collaboration and productivity to new levels. Employees spend less time waiting for file opens and saves and more time focused on value-adding tasks.
2. Centralized, Scalable Storage
With a SAN, storage needs can easily scale up or down depending on business requirements. Additional disk arrays, servers and virtual machines can be non-disruptively added without reconfiguring the infrastructure. This provides near-limitless room for data and application growth. It also facilitates centralized management for simplified operations and cost savings over departmental silos.
3. High-Availability Application
Business continuity is crucial, especially for mission-critical applications. A SAN supports active-active clustering and data replication across sites for continuous availability, even during infrastructure or site outages. If a server fails, applications automatically restart on another server with no data loss or downtime, keeping business processes running around the clock.
4. Optimized Backups and DR Plans
Centralized data on the SAN storage makes backups simpler, faster and more reliable.
- Granular backup schedules can be designed at the file, application or entire volume level.
- Quick recovery points for any data restore keep business running smoothly. Integrated replication enables off-site disaster recovery copies in real-time.
- The SAN’s change block tracking identifies only altered blocks, minimizing backup times. For example, a nightly 500GB full backup that previously took 8 hours may now be completed in just 2 hours. This frees up resources for strategic use.
- Built-in deduplication further shrinks backup sizes by 90% on average by eliminating redundant data copies. Less storage is required for archives, lowering long-term retention costs.
- Comprehensive DR testing validates plans that meet recovery objectives. Granular file-level recovery from snapshots gets users back to production faster after incidents.
- A 1TB database restoring in 1 hour from a SAN storage snapshot versus a traditional backup taking 12 hours means tremendous downtime avoidance.
- Continuous data protection options ensure zero data loss, which is critical for 24/7 operations like financial trading floors.
- Automation streamlines complex failovers, so IT can rapidly re-establish sites remotely in the event of an outage.
5. Simplified Storage Management
Gone are complicated storage architectures that divert IT time from strategic projects. Automated tiered storage capabilities mean “hot” frequently accessed data resides on high-performance disks, while inactive data migrates offline or to the cloud. Virtualized SAN storage tools provide centralized visibility and control over all physical and virtual storage in one place for simplified management of capacity, performance monitoring, reporting and planning.
6. Improved Security and Data Protection
With the SAN, sensitive data can be isolated using storage security features like encryption, access control lists and disk partitioning. This prevents unauthorized access. Always-on data integrity checking ensures early detection of any corruption. Features like fast snapshotting enable easy recovery from ransomware or accidental deletion incidents, minimizing costly downtime. Comprehensive data security is a must for regulatory compliance in many industries as well.
7. Leveraging Hybrid Cloud for Agility
Tiered storage capabilities allow active data blocks to move up or down between SAN storage and object storage in clouds. This provides highly scalable, cost-effective capacity for unstructured data. Files can be moved online or offline as required, and data workflows are optimized across on-premise and cloud resources. It delivers the agility to scale IT resources up or down on demand without upfront capital costs.
8. Optimized Infrastructure Costs
By consolidating fragmented departmental storage into a single shared pool, the SAN eliminates waste and underutilization. IT gets comprehensive visibility for right-sized capacity investments. Storage is provisioned in thin blocks on demand rather than purchased in fixed increments. The overall footprint is reduced while maintaining performance, which is a boon for cutting infrastructure, real estate and energy costs over time.
9. Enhanced Disaster Recovery Process
With a SAN, failover sites can be easily established for quick recovery. Near-synchronous and asynchronous replication takes care of keeping a copy of production data updated at the DR site. Pre-configured automated DR plans simplify testing and ensure RTO/RPO objectives are met. Should disaster strike primary systems, business continuity is maintained through fast, seamless failover to the DR site.
10. Maximized Storage Investments
SAN storage protects past storage expenditures and allows non-disruptive upgrades by adopting new technologies seamlessly. As arrays approach end-of-life, data readily moves to replacements without application downtime. Regular technology refreshes are simplified through migration paths. Overall, storage assets are fully leveraged for longer before requiring replacement.
11. Accelerated Deployment of New Services
Agility is key to revenue growth through new service rollouts. With a modern high-performance SAN, additional instances can rapidly be provisioned alongside storage and networks as virtual machines. Development and testing clones promote faster innovation cycles. Resources follow workload demands, and new ventures are launched without friction.
12. Improved Support Operations
It also streamlines support activities through centralized management. Issues are quickly isolated and addressed via a global view of all servers, storage and data. Automated monitoring and alerts on critical metrics like performance, capacity and faults promote proactive maintenance over disruptive challenges. Integrated troubleshooting tools simplify diagnostics, so the support team can focus on innovation rather than firefighting. With a single management plan for all infrastructure, knowledge transfer between technical staff is seamless, and handovers are efficient during vacation or turnover. A highly optimized, software-defined SAN ensures faster mean-time-to-resolution, raising support SLAs overall.
Summing It Up
In conclusion, modern software-defined SAN storage overcomes traditional silos and manual processes to elevate every facet of business operations. By delivering shared, fast access to data and optimized infrastructure management, organizations across all sectors can gain a turbocharged competitive edge to maximize growth now and well into the future.
