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In order to satisfy customers in e-business - both the business-to-business and business-to-customer environments - you have to run reliably. The reliability and flexibility of Storage Area Networks (SANs) are driving strong interest as companies rapidly implement their e-business infrastructures.
As a new solution, the level of complexity SANs can result in big challenges to management. In addition, IT managers are discovering that being able to see and manage their entire infrastructure's performance is a critical success factor when it comes to reaping the benefits of e-business.
The implementation of high performance, high capacity SANs provides major benefits to businesses in terms of performance and availability - key to a winning e-business strategy. Achieving those benefits in the complex SAN environment means putting in place tools designed to provide visibility into the SAN and across the rest of the infrastructure. Previously, a manager could access performance and resource data about storage directly from the system or server, but storage arrays and SANs remove or remote this capability. Not implementing redundant disk arrays (RAID) and SANS because of this management hole is not an option, due to the explosive growth of real-time database activity underpinning online commerce, and the corresponding requirement for virtually 100 percent uptime, right now.
As you can imagine, managers are learning that getting a SAN up is just the start of the process. The capability to see all the pieces of the SAN, to tune optimally and to minimize response times represents the next step in a SAN implementation. This article will:
* Show you how to "see" and manage the performance of a SAN;
* Highlight roadblocks to achieving high performance in your SAN, including some real-world advice for achieving performance breakthroughs;
* Discuss typical SAN management issues, including storage, switches, plus database, Web and application servers;
* Provide recommendations for optimum e-business performance, from the application and the SAN perspectives
Despite its complexity, a SAN requires the same systems management disciplines as a non-SAN solution, i.e., fault, configuration, change, asset, security and accounting management and, last but not least, performance management. In this article, our focus is on performance management - meaning the monitoring, analysis, correlation, and visualization of performance data from all pieces of a SAN, including applications.
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