Storage Area Network

Contents
1 What is SAN......................................................................................................................................3
1 Universal Storage:........................................................................................................................3
2 Direct Attach Storage...................................................................................................................4
3 Network Attached Storage Network...........................................................................................5
4 Storage Area Network..................................................................................................................7
2 What Makes SAN Best.....................................................................................................................9
3 SAN Software..................................................................................................................................10
4 SAN Software Architecture............................................................................................................11
5 Applications for SAN.......................................................................................................................11
6 Storage Network Architecture.......................................................................................................13
7 Storage System...............................................................................................................................14

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1 What is SAN

A storage area network (SAN) is any high-performance network whose primary

purpose is to enable storage devices to communicate with computer systems
and with each other.

 It doesn’t say that a SAN’s only purpose is communication between

computers and storage. Many organizations operate perfectly viable SANs
that carry occasional administrative and other application traffic.

 It doesn’t say that a SAN uses Fibre Channel or Ethernet or any other
specific interconnect technology. A growing number of network technologies
have architectural and physical properties that make them suitable for use in
SANs.

 It doesn’t say what kind of storage devices are interconnected. Disk and tape

drives, RAID subsystems, robotic libraries, and file servers are all being used
productively in SAN environments today. One of the exciting aspects of SAN
technology is that it is encouraging the development of new kinds
of storage devices that provide new benefits to users. Some of these will
undoubtedly fail in the market, but those that succeed will make lasting
improvements in the way digital information is stored and processed.

The beauty of SANs is that they connect a lot of storage devices to lot of servers
and place in the administrator’s hands the choice of which server gets to access
which storage devices. Storage Area Technology involves:

 Architecture

 Storage

 Networking

 Software

1 Universal Storage:
The problem with universal client – Server storage is that, if application B wants
to access the application A stored data then it is like you need copy the data from
Application A storage to Application B storage. It not only makes cumbersome
but it is like make duplication of data as well which is not good. Here comes to
Storage area network (SAN)

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2 Direct Attach Storage

Direct attached storage is the simplest and most commonly used storage model
found in most standalone PCs, workstations and servers. A typical DAS
configuration consists of a computer that is directly connected to one or several
hard disk drives (HDDs) or disk arrays. Standard buses are used between the
HDDs and the computers, such as SCSI, ATA, Serial-ATA (SATA), or Fibre
Channel (FC). Some of the bus cabling definitions allow for multiple HDDs to be
daisy chained together on each host bus adapter (HBA), host channel adapter, or
integrated interface controller on the host computer.

This is what direct Attach storage looks like

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The software layers of a DAS system are illustrated in Figure 2. The directly
attached storage disk system is managed by the client operating system.
Software applications access data via file I/O system calls into the Operating
System. The file I/O system calls are handled by the File System, which
manages the directory data structure and mapping from files to disk blocks in an
abstract logical disk space. The Volume Manager manages the block resources
that are located in one or more physical disks in the Disk System and maps the
accesses to the logical disk block space to the physical volume/cylinder/sector
address. The Disk System Device Driver ties the Operating System to the Disk
controller or Host Bus Adapter hardware that is responsible for the transfer of
commands and data between the client computer and the disk system.
3 Network Attached Storage Network
After seeing the consequences of binding storage to individual computers in the
DAS model, the benefits of sharing storage resources over the network become
obvious. NAS and SAN are two ways of sharing storage over the network. NAS
is generally referred to as storage that is directly attached to a computer network
(LAN) through network file system protocols such as NFS and CIFS.
The difference between NAS and SAN is that NAS does “file-level I/O” while SAN
does “blocklevel I/O” over the network. For practical reasons, the distinction
between block level access and file level access is of little importance and can be
easily dismissed as implementation details.

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Logically, the NAS storage system involves two types of devices: the client
computer systems, and the NAS devices.
There can be multiple instances of each type in a NAS network. The NAS
devices present storage resources onto the LAN network that are shared by the
client computer systems attached to the LAN. The client Application accesses
the virtual storage resource without knowledge of the whereabouts of the
resource. In the client system, the application File I/O access requests are
handled by the client Operating System in the form of systems calls, identical to
the systems calls that would be generated in a DAS system. The difference is in
how the systems calls are processed by the Operating System. The systems
calls are intercepted by an I/O redirector layer that determines if the accessed
data is part of the remote file system or the local attached file system. If the data
is part of the DAS system, the systems calls are handled by the local file system.
If the data is part of the remote file system, the file director passes the
commands onto the Network File System Protocol stack that maps the file
access system calls into command messages for accessing the remote file
servers in the form of NFS or CIFS messages. These remote file access
messages are then passed onto the TCP/IP protocol stack, which ensures
reliable transport of the message across the network. The NIC driver ties the
TCP/IP stack to the Traditional computer storage is defined by each server and
attached the storage device, Ethernet Network Interface card. The Ethernet NIC
provides the physical interface and media access control function to the LAN network.

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In the NAS device, the Network Interface Card receives the Ethernet frames
carrying the remote file access commands. The NIC driver presents the
datagrams to the TCP/IP stack. The TCP/IP stack recovers the original NFS or
CIFS messages sent by the client system. The NFS file access handler
processes the remote file commands from the NFS/CIFS messages and maps
the commands into file access system calls to file system of the NAS device. The
NAS file system, the volume manager and disk system device driver operate in a
similar way as the DAS file system, translating the file I/O commands into block
I/O transfers between the Disk Controller/ HBA and the Disk System that is either
part of the NAS device or attached to the NAS device externally. It is important to
note that the Disk System can be one disk drive, a number of disk drives
clustered together in a daisy-chain or a loop, an external storage system rack, or
even the storage resources presented to a SAN network that is connected with
the HBA of the NAS device. In all cases, the storage resources attached to the
NAS device can be accessed via the HBA or Disk controller with block level I/O.

There are several techniques for moving data between computers: backup, file
transfer, and inter process communication, to name a few. But the real issue is
that the information services organization has to acquire and manage the extra
resources required both to copy data from Computer A to Computer B and
to store it at both sites. There’s no business reason for this duplication of effort,
other than that a computer needs data that was produced by another computer.

4 Storage Area Network

You can see in the above picture, that all devices are connected to one storage
line called Storage Area Network. All servers are connected to storage SAN, with
this architecture any application any data from the storage devices which any of
the application stored.

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Benefits of Storage Area Network:

 Reducing the cost of providing today’s information services or providing or

enabling new services that contribute positively to overall enterprise goals.
 If all online storage is accessible by all computers, then no extra
temporary storage is required to stage data that is produced by one computer
and used by others. This can represent a substantial capital cost saving.
 Reduces total enterprise capital cost for information processing without
diminishing the quality of service delivered as reusing of TapeDrive which is
little bit expensive
 Administrative and operational savings in not having to implement and
manage procedures for copying data from place to place. This can greatly
reduce the cost of people—the one component cost of providing information
services that doesn’t go down every year
 SAN connectivity enables the grouping of computers into
cooperative clusters that can recover quickly from equipment or application
failures and allow data processing to continue 24 hours a day, every day of
the year.

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2 What Makes SAN Best

Rule 1: When designing a SAN to access critical enterprise data, make sure the
SAN is highly available (i.e., can survive failures of both components in it and
components attached to it) and make sure it can grow well beyond anticipated
peak performance needs without disruption.

Rule 2: When evaluating SAN implementation options, once the basic capacity,
availability, and performance requirements can be met, look for advanced
functionality available in the chosen architecture and consider how it might be
used to further reduce cost or enhance the information services delivered to
users.

Rule: 3 Hardware makes SANs possible; software makes SANs happen.

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3 SAN Software

System applications:  These applications build upon the basic SAN properties
to provide a functionally enhanced execution environment for business
applications. System applications include

 clustering,

 data replication,

 direct data copy between devices and

 The utility functions that use it, and so forth. 

Management applications. These applications manage the inherently more

complex distributed system environment created by the presence of SANs.

 Zoning, device discovery

 Allocation

 RAID subsystem configurations are examples of applications that fall into

this category. 

SAN Software Capability

 Sharing Tape Drives: Tape drives indeed a very expensive devices.What is to

keep a computer from (accidentally) writing to a tape while another computer
is doing a backup? For two or three computers, an administrator can
personally schedule tape drive usage so that this doesn’t happen. Here we
required the software take care of two or more application scheduling the
writing to it.

 Sharing Online Storage Devices: These are in housed RAID Sub System is

similar to sharing Tape Drives. Except that more of it goes on and
requirements for configuration changes are more dynamic. A typical
enterprise RAID subsystem makes the online storage capacity of one or
more arrays of disks appear to be one or more very large, very fast, or very
reliable disks.

o Application Failover

o Sharing Data

o Direct Data Movement between Devices

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4 SAN Software Architecture

SAN is essentially the same as the

software architecture of a DAS system.
The key difference here is that the disk
controller driver is replaced by either the
Fibre Channel protocol stack, or the
iSCSI/TCP/IP stack that provides the
transport function for block I/O commands
to the remote disk system across the SAN
network. Using Fibre Channel as an
example, the block I/O SCSI commands
are mapped into Fibre Channel frames at
the FC-4 layer (FCP). The FC-2 and FC-1
layer provides the signaling and physical
transport of the frames via the HBA driver
and the HBA hardware. As the abstraction
of storage resources is provided at the
block level, the applications that access
data at the block level can work in a SAN
environment just as they would in a DAS
environment. This property is a key
benefit of the SAN model over the
NAS, as some high performance
applications, such as database
management systems, are
designed to access data at the block level to improve their performance. Some
database management systems even use proprietary file systems that are
optimized for database applications. For such environments, it is difficult to use
NAS as the storage solution because NAS provides only abstraction of network
resources at the file system level for standard file systems that the Database
Management System may not be compatible with. However, such applications
have no difficulty migrating to a SAN model, where the proprietary file systems
can live on top of the block level I/O supported by the SAN network. In the SAN
storage model, the operating system views storage resources as SCSI devices.
Therefore, the SAN infrastructure can directly replace Direct Attach Storage
without significant change to the operating system.

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5 Applications for SAN

The new applications enabled by SAN technlogoy are actually new ways of
organizing, accessing, and managing data. It is not that SAN technology
introduces new accounting, transaction processing, Web server, electronic
business or other techniques.

 Application 1: Backup: Electronic business has essentially eliminated

computer system idle time and sent developers on a search for less obtrusive
solutions to the backup problem. With today’s technology, applications and
database management systems must usually be made quiescent for an
instant in order to get a backup started. This is an area for future
development. Backups protect against hardware failures, software mal
functions, and user errors. Volume managers and RAID subsystems are
tending to assume more of a role in protecting against hardware failures. The
role of backup in creating point in time images of enterprise data remains.
o LAN free backup: Bulk data travels over a SAN. LAN free backup
removes backup data transfers from the LAN, with the result that
backup no longer affects the performance of un involved clients and
servers. Use of SCSI.
o Tape Drive Sharing: As you know that tape sharing is an expensive
device. It is connected to directly to SAN where it can accessed by
backup application to backup.
o The Designated Backup Server: There is a designated server which
will schedule the backup.
o Server less backup: In this case, instead of the copying the data to
server from the disk, server directly give the command to RAID asking
this much of bulk data has to be copy, so it is directly handled.
o Off – Host NAS Backup

 Application 2: Highly Available Data: Highly availability of data is a must for

continuous computing. SAN Technology can be used to protect against a
wider variety of threats to data integrity. RAID subsystem based protection
against hardware failure can be augmented by server based volume
management to create snapshots of operational data for mining and impact
free backup purposes.
o Mirroring 101: Technique of mirroring the data when one server writes
data on to one disk will be automatically replicated to other.

 Application 3: Disaster Recoverability: The data is stored in two different

physical locations where data distribution will be started.

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 Application 4: Clusters – Continuous Computing: Cluster technology

organizes the resources required to run an application and manages failover
from one server to another. Failover may be automatic, as when a server fails
and its applications are restarted on an alternate server, or manual, in which
an administrator forces an application to migrate from one server to another
for maintenance purpose.
 Application 5: Data Replication: Data replication technology can be used to
enable recovery from site disasters, for publication or consolidation of data in
a distributed enterprise, or for moving data from one server to another.
Variations of replication technology are used to replicate volumes, files and
directory and databases.

Replication technology differs from mirroring in that it is designed to work

with unreliable connections between primary and secondary sites and
designed for situations in which the time required to propagate updates to
secondary sites cannot be part of applications response time.

6 Storage Network Architecture

The Volume: Disks are often logically combined by software that uses mirroring,
RAID, and striping techniques to improve their net storage capacity, reliability, or
I/O performance characteristics. Software that combines disks in this way
presents disk-like storage entities to its clients. These disk-like entities are
commonly known as volumes, logical units (abbreviated LUNs, for the numbers
by which logical units are identified in popular I/O protocols), or virtual disks.

BASIC SAN MODEL

The figure illustrates the basic SAN data access model for a simple system with
a SAN In this system, the file system runs in the application server. Volume
functionality would typically be provided by external RAID controllers attached to
the SAN, possibly augmented by a server-based volume manager.

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7 Storage System
In order to understand the storage systems, it is important to understand the disk
drives, the most common building block of system systems, and the disk drive
interface technologies used.

The storage devices include RAID disk arrays, Just a Bunch Of Disks (JBODs),
tape systems, Network Attached Storage Systems, optical storage systems etc.
The type of interfaces provided on these devices includes SCSI, Fibre Channel,
and Ethernet.

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 Disk Drive Interfaces

o ATA
o SATA
o SCSI
o SAS
o Fibre Channel
o JBOD
o RAID

ATA: ATA is the primary internal storage interface for the PC, connecting the
host system to peripherals such as hard drives, optical drives, CD-ROMs
SATA: Serial ATA is the next generation internal storage inter connect designed
to replace Ultra ATA. The SATA interface is an evolution of the ATA interface
from parallel bus to serial bus architecture. The serial bus architecture
overcomes the difficult electrical constraints hindering continued speed
enhancement of the parallel ATA bus.
SCSI: Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) defines a universal, parallel
system interface, called the SCSI bus, for connecting up to eight devices along a
single cable. SCSI is an independent and intelligent local I/O bus through which a
variety of different devices and one or more controllers can communicate and
exchange information independent of the rest of the system.
SAS: To overcome the bandwidth barrier of parallel bus cabling, the Serial
Attached SCSI (SAS) is being defined to replace the physical layer of SCSI with
serial bus technology. SAS is a new near-cabinet and disk interface technology
that leverages the best of the SCSI and serial ATA interfaces to bring new
capabilities, higher levels of availability, and more scalable performance to future
generations of servers and storage systems. SAS uses a serial, point-to-point
topology to overcome the performance barriers associated with storage systems
based on parallel bus or arbitrated loop architectures
Fibre Channel: Fibre Channel Disk Drives typically come with single or dual
Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) interfaces. The dual FC-AL interface is
useful in storage systems for providing redundant cabling. Some drives even
allow concurrent access from the two interfaces to increase the bandwidth to the
drive. fabric. Using the FC-AL protocol, a large number of disk drives can be
connected together for large capacity storage systems. All the devices on the
loop share the bandwidth of the loop. To prevent a single point of failure in the
physical loop topology, the disk drives in a storage system are typically
connected to a central Port Bypass Controller (PBC) in a star topology.
RAID: RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a technology to combine
multiple small, independent disk drivers into an array that looks like a single, big
disk drive to the system. Simply putting n disk drives together (as in JBOD)
results in a system with a failure rate that is n times the failure rate of a single
disk. The high failure rate makes the disk array concept impractical for
addressing the high reliability and large capacity needs of enterprise storage.

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