Server Consolidation demands
Storage Consolidation

In a direct-attached storage (DAS) environment, expanding capacity to address growth requirements means adding servers or shutting down existing servers to add more storage. Costs are added in the form of additional hardware, server licenses, maintenance, and headcount. Tension mounts when there’s a lack of funds available to address these uptime and growth requirements.

An IP-SAN Network can eliminate the need to keep increasing the number of servers and can frequently result in a dramatic reduction in the number of servers you need to support a given application. With this networked storage solution, your database or application server can be mapped to an infinite amount of logical disk space. You never again have to split and load balance between multiple servers for the same application just because you ran out of DAS capacity on the server.

You benefit from:

• Each time an IP-SAN Array is added to the storage pool, the intelligence in the IP SAN automatically redistributes the data across the arrays in the cluster, with no administrator involvement. This is a radically different approach than a DAS or NAS environment where all data movement associated with adding additional captive storage or a new NAS box requires the administrator to manually move and balance data amongst the servers.
• The capacity of the IP SAN storage pool can be assigned to application servers as needed, completely eliminating the issue of inefficient provisioning common in DAS and NAS environments. As a particular application requires more storage, the IT administrator simply assigns more capacity to the volume associated with that application. Similarly, under-utilized capacity can be reassigned, allowing administrators to double the capacity utilization over a typical DAS environment.
• An IP-SAN Array can be added directly to your corporate Ethernet LAN like any IP device. There’s no downtime involved in adding an additional IP-SAN Array. When you run out of storage space again, simply add another IP-SAN Array to your network - there is no limit to the number of IP-SAN Array that can be added.
• Volumes created on the IP SAN act like direct-attached disks to your database or application servers.
• Seamless storage pool and volume expansion to keep up with rapidly growing data needs.
• Efficient management of storage volumes on the fly, eliminating wasted storage capacity and allowing storage to scale independently of servers.
• Addition of disk drives and network connections with each IP-SAN Array optimize performance
• Disk-to-disk backup and snapshot technology to solve the backup problem
• Volume-level replication, both locally and remotely, to ensure data availability
• Automatic failover to ensure continuous operations.