Storage area networks (SANs) and pooled storage solutions allow companies to share homogeneous storage resources across the enterprise. But for many companies, information resources are spread over multiple locations in a variety of different storage environments. Often, SANs comprise products from different vendors, who supply some components, but not everything in the overall IT environment. This scenario has resulted in complexities and challenges, especially in a heterogeneous client, server and storage environment. IT staffs now face the challenge of connecting disparate applications, servers, storage and operating systems.

In addition to the complexity of managing storage systems, companies must also balance rapidly growing storage needs with cost control. Lean budgets limit a company's ability to withstand unavailability, downtime, underutilized storage capacity or manual problem resolution. Additionally, as storage needs increase-and they are increasing for most businesses - the best solutions are those that leverage the latest storage technology breakthroughs, allow for future growth and can adapt to changing business needs.

This solution is designed to integrate IBM's virtualisation technology with Fibre Channel switches and Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) storage technologies into a preconfigured, comprehensive solution. Delivered and installed as an integrated unit, it offers upgrade options for connectivity, storage capacity and performance levels. The solution helps provide the benefits of SANs with ease of manageability. The SAN Integration Server can help manage over 100 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity1 and support up to 26 hosts with the ability to increase to up to 42 hosts when available.

The SAN Integration Server provides centralized management through a single interface to support easier storage allocation and address application demands. This flexibility helps to provide the benefit of better storage utilization by reducing or eliminating the problem of unused storage found in direct attached storage (DAS) implementations, and to reduce required administrative time and resources. These are key factors in realizing a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

The architecture of the SAN Integration Server is designed to bring enterpriseclass reliability and performance to open-systems environments. It features hardware redundancy and elements of IBM's advanced autonomic computing technologies. The intent is to help minimize downtime and improve availability while performing remote mirroring; point-in-time copies; backup and restore; maintenance functions; and performance, capacity and connectivity upgrades.

IBM has designed and tested the SAN Integration Server for integration into existing environments, including heterogeneous hardware and operating systems. It is interoperable with a wide range of servers running Linux, UNIX® and Microsoft® Windows® operating systems, whether from IBM or other vendors.

Through virtualisation technology, SAN Integration Server is capable of creating pools of managed disks, spanning multiple storage subsystems. Utilizing these virtual disks will help administrators make better use of a company's storage facilities. Ease of management is provided through the powerful and comprehensive graphical interface of the master console. As a result, SAN Integration Server has the potential to help improve resource management and facilitate better responsiveness to ever-changing storage needs.

With SAN Integration Server, administrators will be able to manage up to 100 TB of storage capacity and allocate that storage from a single console-whether it's a laptop, an office PC or remote connection from another city. The management console will be capable of providing a view of the system's internal network with a topology onscreen, along with the capability to drill down into this topology for more detail. This management interface is based on open standards, and supports the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMIS) application programming interface (API) and further demonstrates IBM's focus on open standards.

SAN Integration Server, with its dynamic data-migration utility for migrating information from one storage device to another, can move information without taking it offline.

SAN Integration Server has been developed to leverage the same multipathing software used in the most advanced IBM storage systems, such as the IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server^TM. This software allows administrators to reallocate and scale storage capacity, and increase performance and connectivity without disrupting applications. The use of this multipathing technology allows both local area network (LAN) free and server-free backups while supporting continuous access to data. Its highly available clustered configuration is designed to provide for nondisruptive hardware and software upgrades.

SAN Integration Server is designed to scale to over 100 TB, all of which can be managed by one administrator. By providing a large pool of storage to multiple hosts, the system is intended to reduce the amount of unused storage capacity typically found in DAS implementations.

The IBM TotalStorage SAN Integration Server supports advanced copy services options-such as FlashCopy® and remote mirroring-to improve disaster recover and offer business continuance benefits.

In an era in which businesses are integrating processes across the enterprise, SAN Integration Server can help companies become on demand businesses, responding with flexibility and speed to customer demands, market opportunities or competitive threats. With the solution's integration, support of open standards, and virtualisation and autonomic capabilities, companies can be better positioned to meet storage management challenges.

IBM offers services to help speed implementation and return on investment (ROI). Our knowledgeable storage specialists can conduct storage solution and infrastructure reviews to help prepare and speed initial installation, and to examine your existing infrastructures to determine sizing and performance needs. In addition, we offer a range of service and subscription offerings to keep your storage infrastructure up-to-date and running smoothly.