You’ve worked hard to build your business and acquire customers over the years. However, you also know that unexpected disasters, whether natural or man-made, can threaten to bring it all crashing down in an instant if you’re not properly prepared. A single event like a fire, flood, or ransomware attack could wipe out your servers and compromise all of your important business and customer data if it’s not properly backed up and protected.
A storage area network is a solution that can help streamline your disaster recovery processes and keep your data safe. It uses high-speed networking to connect different IT resources together for storage and data sharing.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the key ways a SAN can help your business.
Consolidated Data Storage
A SAN pulls together storage from multiple physical servers, applications, and users onto pooled storage that can be accessed simultaneously. This centralised data storage model simplifies backup and recovery.
Increased Performance and Throughput
By offloading storage tasks from servers to these networks, you free up resources for improved application performance. They also use a high-speed fibre channel, or iSCSI, to deliver faster data access and transfer speeds.
Continuous Data Protection and Versioning
Advanced SANs provide a feature known as continuous data protection that takes snapshots of your data extremely frequently, such as every 15 minutes, to create multiple recovery points. This allows you to roll back to nearly any point in time to recover specific files or an entire server instantly in the event of data loss or corruption.
- Rather than relying on hourly or daily backups that could result in significant data loss, continuous data protection gets you back up and running in minutes.
- Most storage networks store weeks or even months worth of snapshots to give you flexibility.
- You have the option to recover data from any point during that time frame. If a simple file deletion occurs, you can roll back just that file without disrupting the whole system.
- If a ransomware attack encrypts your files, you can restore your entire server to a point before the attack. With hundreds of recovery points available, you have amazing granularity and control over restoring precise versions of data and servers.
- Continuous data protection also integrates with application-aware features. For example, it understands that a database has transaction logs and can recover the database to a transactionally consistent point in time.
- This ensures an application like Microsoft Exchange can be recovered without needing to run recovery wizards or risking data corruption. Your recovery is fast, simple and accurate, with continuous data protection.
Automated, Application-Aware Backup and Recovery
Many SANs can be configured to automatically detect changes to data and applications to perform optimised, application-aware backups without disrupting operations. They also streamline recovery by allowing you to easily restore entire systems or specific files and data.
Improved Data Security and Access Controls
With this network, you maintain strict control over who can access what data through role-based access controls. Advanced features also integrate with directory services for authentication and encryption of data both at rest and in transit
Non-Disruptive Operating System and Application Migration
A storage area network facilitates the non-disruptive migration of applications and entire operating systems to different servers without interrupting user access to data or applications. This allows for server hardware refreshes without downtime.
Easy Scalability and Expansion
As your storage needs grow, a SAN allows for the addition of new storage through a simple, non-disruptive process. Additional disk shelves or arrays can be added without reconfiguring servers or applications.
Investment Protection
A storage network is a flexible shared infrastructure that can support new applications and servers added over time. It future-proofs your storage investment and avoids the risks of being locked into proprietary hardware that may become obsolete.
Remote Replication and Disaster Recovery
For true business continuity, a storage network supports synchronous or asynchronous remote replication of data to a secondary site. This provides a live, secondary system for failover in case of primary site failure or disaster.
Virtualization and Consolidation
A storage network makes it possible to consolidate multiple physical servers onto virtual machines for improved hardware utilisation. This reduces costs through server consolidation while increasing flexibility.
Shared Storage for Multi-Server Clustering
A SAN provides the perfect foundation for server clustering by offering shared storage that multiple application servers can access simultaneously.
- Clustering allows you to configure two or more physical servers to work together, so if one fails, the others can immediately take on the load to keep business processes running.
- Applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint fully support clustering for maximum uptime of mission-critical email, database and productivity services.
- With a storage network, the storage is abstracted from any individual server. This shared storage approach means all clustered servers have access to the same user data, applications and operating system files.
- If one server experiences hardware failure or planned maintenance, the application workload automatically fails over to the other servers without interruption. Users remain productive without realising any servers have switched.
- Advanced storage area network management software allows you to easily set up and configure clustering. You can monitor server and application health while automating failover processes.
- If issues arise, failover occurs within minutes without any lost connections or transactions.
- Clustering prevents a single server failure from causing an application outage, keeping your business running seamlessly. And with the shared storage model of a storage network, clustering can scale to support more servers and applications as your needs grow over time
Simplified Management and Monitoring
Advanced SAN management software provides a single, centralised view and control over all physical and virtual storage. Alerts also simplify monitoring for performance, capacity, and issues.
Conclusion
A well-designed SAN provides the integrated data services that small and medium-sized businesses need to protect themselves from disasters while maintaining continuous operations. With features for high-performance access, continuous data protection, automated backup and recovery, non-disruptive migration, remote replication, and more, a SAN acts as the backbone of a robust disaster recovery plan and secure infrastructure. If you’re looking for an affordable way to streamline disaster recovery and secure your business-critical data, consider the benefits a SAN can deliver to help you prepare for the unexpected.
