Storage Consolidation — Part 3 — Implementation Details

  Peter Baer Galvin

Last month, my Solaris Companion column discussed product selection. Storage arrays, SAN switches, tape drives and libraries, and replication all have options to consider and tradeoffs to weigh. This month, the rubber meets the road as my column addresses implementation. As with all projects, the architecture must be correct, but the success of the final solution depends on the implementation and the details. Mistakes and oversights in implementation can turn a SAN dream into a storage nightmare, so I hope this column will provide information to help you rest easy.

Design Completion

The final steps in preparing to deploy that shiny new consolidated storage solution involve several crucial decisions. These issues, based on your circumstances, might already be resolved in your design plan, but typically the hard decisions are pushed until the end. If the storage is going into a new facility, many of these questions are moot. However, since most storage is placed in existing environments, I’ll assume this is a legacy-integration circumstance.

The first decision involves choosing where data and applications are going to live. Now is a great time to address any compromises your site may have made along the way. Take this opportunity to put elegance and style into your environment by striving for ease of management and enhanced functionality. As a practical example, consider moving all applications and data from internal disks and direct-attached disks to SAN- and NAS-attached disks. Once done, even your largest servers could be considered commodity Field Replaceable Units. For instance, consider a database server that is at performance capacity. If its applications and data were on a SAN, moving the database to a faster machine would no longer be a dreaded task.