Storage Area Network (SAN)

What is a Storage Area Network (SAN)?
As your business operates and grows, more and more data and information gets compiled, stored and maintained. A Storage Area Network (SAN) allows you to expand storage to keep pace with this data growth in a simple and economical manner. This specialized network provides access to high performance and highly available storage subsystems using block storage protocols. The main characteristic of a SAN is that the storage subsystems are generally available to multiple hosts at the same time, which makes them scalable and flexible.


What drives an organization to implement a SAN?
Organizations choose a SAN as a reliable solution for consolidated data storage, data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity.


What are the benefits of a SAN?
By implementing a SAN, your organization can expect to:

  • Reduce disk expenditures by increasing usable disk capacity
  • Dramatically reduce administrative labor costs by managing more data in less time
  • Recover from disasters in minutes, not hours or days
  • Minimize the environmental impact of power and cooling
  • Reduce storage maintenance costs
  • Reduce data center/rack floor space

 

Customer Feature: Des Moines University
It was Des Moines University’s interest in virtualization software that eventually led to a Storage Area Network (SAN) from Alliance Technologies...

Title: "How Des Moines University benefits from centralized storage" (Page 6, click image below)
Note: this article is from the Business Connections publication from our affiliate Iowa Network Services.