Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore?

I have had many interesting conversations about my post on Advantages of DAS over SAN storage in Exchange 2007 and the related session I delivered at Tech.Ed 2008… many sceptics have seen the light, although some remain sceptical.

It’s interesting to see that Forrester have published a paper titled “Do You Really Need A SAN Anymore? ”.

An excerpt from the paper…

It's been the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years that to provide the best performance, protection, and capacity utilization for applications and databases, you need a robust storage array in a storage area network (SAN). But with low capacity utilization, the inability to prioritize application performance, long provisioning times, and soaring costs, SANs haven't lived up to their promise. SANs also leave application, database, and system administrators at the mercy of storage administrators for all their storage-related needs, such as capacity, data copies, and backups. To regain control and get better results, application vendors are starting to subsume more storage functionality into the application itself, giving IT buyers the option to spend less on commodity storage and get their high-value features from the application. The time has come for buyers to question the value of their SAN and consider simpler options that fit better with the applications they truly care about.

A very interesting read on allowing advanced applications (e.g. Exchange) look after storage.  Unfortunately it’s not free, but you can purchase and read the paper at https://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,47089,00.html

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Thanks :)

• Anonymous
  December 26, 2008
  The original post was great...personally i get tired of people throwing an EVA at Exchange as a storage solution....