Leveraging NAS and SAN Solutions for Server Consolidation
| One of the most popular uses for NAS and SAN devices is to reduce the number of servers in the environment by consolidating servers and server functions. Rather than have dozens and dozens of file servers with locally attached storage, a smaller number of servers with NAS- or SAN-attached storage can serve the same purpose. Consolidating the Number of Exchange ServersExchange servers were traditionally sized based not only on performance potential but also on the time needed to recover a system. Administrators knew that if they had a four- hour Service Level Agreement for system recovery they could count on using half that time to recover data from tape and half that time to perform the recovery tasks . This meant that they could only have as much local storage as they could recover in two hours. So if a backup/restore system could restore 16GB of data in two hours and each user was allowed 100MB of storage, the maximum number of users on the system would be 160. For a company of 1,600 users, this would mean 10 Exchange servers would be required to support the four-hour SLA. By placing the mailbox stores onto a NAS or SAN device that can be mirrored and snapshotted, the recoverability time for a 16GB database would drop to mere minutes. Now the bottleneck would become the performance of the server itself and possibly the IO rate of the NAS or SAN. Odds are that the systems that had been purchased for the ability to support 160 users would be dual processor systems with a Gig or two of memory. By reducing the server count to two and fully populating those two systems with memory taken from the retired systems, the two systems with NAS- or SAN-based mailboxes could easily support the 800 users each and still meet the four-hour recovery time required by the SLA. This would result in the reduction of eight Exchange servers which would free up OS licenses and hardware as well as reduce the effort required to manage the data center.
Consolidating the Number of File ServersMost companies grow their file server environment in an organic manner. This is to say that as different groups in the company come up with needs for data storage, additional file servers are brought up. This can be an expensive process in that each of these file servers requires not only hardware but also an operating system, antivirus software, management software, space in the data center, facilities like cooling and electricity, and many other expenses. Users take storage for granted because drive prices are relatively inexpensive and they believe that disks can just be added and added forever so that they can fill it. This results in a difficult to manage environment for the IT professional. When system patches become available it can be quite an event to ensure that potentially hundreds of file servers are up to date. Companies that enforce a life cycle for their servers find themselves replacing more and more servers each year. NAS and SAN devices offer a solution to this problem. By consolidating the storage of data and presenting this data to the user community through a smaller number of high-performance file server clusters, you can ensure that users have reliable access to the files they need. At the same time, you can greatly reduce the management overhead of the vast number of servers and reduce costs across the board. In environments where file servers are brought up simply to provide better access for local users, you can leverage technologies like DFS and mirroring to make data available to each location. Through DFS and site locality, users can ensure that they are reaching the closest copy of a file without any sort of user interaction. By leveraging a SAN or NAS at each major location administrators can still reduce the number of file servers at each location and maintain the same if not better level of support.
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 325