Storage Area Networks (SANs)

There is a relatively recent trend to use Storage Area Networks (SANs) as the standard disc storage mechanism in organisations. The attraction to move BI to a SAN is understandable, as BI often:

is a large disc space user
expands its disc space requirements consistently over time
requires more complex disc management and tuning.

All of the above are strong drivers to use disc SAN for your data warehouse, as a good SAN will provide strong availability, scalability and manageability.

There is a movement within many organisations to centralise and simplify storage management. The result is that major applications, including BI, are placed on a single or several shared SANs. This can be problematic because:

a shared SAN is required to support two very different usage profiles, and either the on–line applications or BI will normally lose out. BI workloads are either incredibly heavy or incredibly light. Your typical on–line application has a more gently variable and steady workload over the day.

BI requires large amounts of data to be transferred to a BI server and can swamp shared network resources.

We have rarely seen BI work on a shared SAN. A dedicated BI SAN is a very different kettle of fish, of course.

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Storage Area Networks (SANs)