Considerations When Selecting Fabric for SANs

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Considerations When Selecting a Fabric for Storage Area Networks

Today, there are a variety of architectures, fabrics, and protocols that can be utilized for SANs). Because of this, the challenges in choosing the right approach, fabric, and protocol to optimize application performance are not trivial, nor are all the tradeoffs obvious when making such as choice.

The choice of a storage architecture (and the fabric and protocols utilized) is generally driven by four factors:
1) The ‘scale’ of the SAN; e.g., how many nodes need to access the shared storage pool.
2) The performance required, as measured by throughput (either bandwidth or packets per second for a given packet size) and latency (the time it takes to complete a storage command).
3) The consistency of the performance that applications require before their availability is compromised.
4) Whether a dedicated SAN can be utilized, or whether a converged network is required, either due to economics or other constraints.