SAN Case Study

Business Profile

A mid-sized publishing house has a centralized IT department located in San Francisco, CA, which is connected to 3 branch offices on the west coast. Recent analysis of the storage environment suggests that they are getting poor ROI on their storage infrastructure

Current Situation/Issue

The companys current infrastructure consists of several storage arrays direct-attached to a heterogeneous mix of 90 servers. All servers are dual-attached to the arrays for reliability and redundancy. Since each storage device has 32 connectivity ports, each could support a maximum of 16 servers. The company sees the 32 ports as a limitation. Each storage device has the disk capacity to support more than 16 servers. However, there is no way to add an additional server to make use of that capacity and support future growth.

Proposal

How would you suggest that the company restructure its environment? List the advantages and disadvantages of your proposed solution. Note: You will need to justify your choice based on scalability, performance, and availability of the new solution.

Your paper:

Minimum of 1 page with no the title page or table of contents. Use a reference page only if you need to cite something you quote or paraphrase in your paper. The pages are to be written in 12 point Verdana, double spaced, with 1 margins. If you place any copied material in the document that is not referenced properly, it will be considered plagiarism, and you will receive a 0 grade. Provide business reasons for your decisions.