Practical Storage Area Networking
Daniel Pollack · CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2002
From the Book: This book is for systems administrators, storage administrators, or anyone else who has been given the difficult and unglamorous task of ensuring that data can be stored and retrieved consistently, for any application, in their environment. Anyone with intermediate knowledge of storage devices and how they are integrated into applications and systems can use the information in this book to build a SAN. SANs have become a major technology for deploying storage, and there is extensive discussion about it's merits and limitations, but very little about the actual nuts and bolts of SAN building and operating. My aim for this book is to enable builders of storage systems to progress from thinking about SANs to doing them, by explaining what I have done when implementing my own SANs. I will cover the topic of SAN building with examples from my own experiences with SANs. The examples are not intended to be a complete recipe because each environment is unique. I decided to illustrate a number of good practices that I have developed for myself to help bridge the gap between the concept for a SAN and the physical deployment of a SAN. My hope is that these practices create a framework for SAN builders to refer to when a SAN is the solution to the problem their particular requirements present. The book gives particular focus to the assessment of I/O behaviors in host systems, storage devices, and applications. This focus is the staring point for the SAN designs discussed throughout the book. I believe that the focus on I/O assessment is particularly important because it helps set expectations and parameters for an initial SAN design. The discussions of several typical SANsare consistent throughout the book and take the reader through the assessment, design, deployment, and operation phases of these SANs. The reduction of a SAN project into these phases helps reduce the amount of work involved in building a SAN by ordering the work in a logical way. Applying the methods in the book is described by their use in the SAN examples. A SAN builder will be able to make any necessary modifications for their own environments. The use of the methods in this book will enable more successful SAN projects.