IP and Fiber and SANS oh my!

Digital information is increasingly becoming a critical component of the way a church does business today. At Fellowship it has not only continuously grown in volume, but more than ever it must be available around the clock. During this growth, there has been a direct paradigm of volume and availability to the growth of our church. The inability to access data for downtime or system outages has grown to point where we have to make a change in order to meet this growing demand.

Ah, but recognition of the trend and the realization that it is time to make a change, that was the easy part. Now to solve the real challenge of adding to the ever-shrinking or forgotten IT budget, and presented with the real challenge of how do you provide for cost-effective, efficient storage, management, and most importantly, availability of your data?

That’s where we are at Fellowship Church. It has become time to look into a storage area network (SAN) solution. As you probably already know the cost and complexity of a SAN can be quite a frightful undertaking. Do we have the funds? Do I have the staff expertise and bandwidth to manage such a solution?

For those of you that are not so familiar with the technology, here is a little synopsis:
LANs enable multiple PCs to share key IT resources such as applications, servers, shared files, and printers. SANs provide similar resource sharing, but they are specifically designed for servers to share storage devices such as disk arrays or tape libraries.

SANs key benefits:
• Online scalability, so you can easily add storage to meet changing capacity requirements
• High levels of availability, ensuring your data and applications are fully accessible at all times, even during backup
• Centralized data management
• High utilization of disk capacity even during backup or in the event of component failure
• Faster data restoration

There are basically two different types of SANS. There are Fiber Channel and IP SANS. Each of which have benefits, but typically the most cost effective is the IP SAN.

Fiber Channel SANs
· Better performance for transaction-intensive applications such as databases
· Requires specialized knowledge
· More expensive technology
· Super fast and very reliable

IP SANs
· Good for less high performing file/print sharing, Exchange and SQL server apps
· Requires experience with Ethernet (as opposed to fiber channel)
· Less-expensive technology – about 20-30 percent
· Minimum disruption to infrastructure


We have yet to make a decision on what technology we are going to use and who we are going to get it from. But the need is there. We just have to do our due diligence on finding the best solution for our environment and requirements. We are currently looking at solutions from Dell, HP, Xiotech, and StoneFly. I hope to have a solution picked out and being implementation by the first quarter of ’05.