Migrating Storage from DAS
Why consolidate storage? For the small business that is not yet overwhelmed by the accumulation of information, or the struggle to manage, access, and protect information, the need for storage consolidation may not be obvious. But for the growing business, the drawbacks to direct attached storage (DAS) quickly begin to outweigh the advantages.
On This Page
 | The Limitations to Direct Attached Storage |
| The Advantages of Attaching Storage to the Network |
| Keeping it Simple |
The Limitations to Direct Attached Storage
Most computers are designed with storage on board. What happens when hard drives run out of space? Applications crash, data may be lost, and productivity comes grinding to a halt. Adding more computers or hard drives, while a temporary solution, can create additional problems, including:
| • | Inflexible Resource Sharing |
| • | Backup Complexity |
| • | Equipment Proliferation |
Getting around these issues doesn't necessarily mean that you have to migrate from DAS directly to a SAN. Another option if storage needs rise, is to add more servers, and maintaining those servers can become an additional problem. Putting storage on the network can help avoid such problems.
The Advantages of Attaching Storage to the Network
The key distinction of storage networking technologies is that storage is uncoupled from the server and housed on a storage network where multiple servers can access it. Servers continue to run applications and send traffic across the network, but the final destination of data is now a storage array on the network. This approach to storage has several critical advantages:
| • | Highly Effective Resource Sharing |
| • | Centralized Storage Management and Data Protection |
| • | Equipment Consolidation |
Keeping it Simple
On the other hand, storage area networks do require the investment of some enabling technologies, and that's where the issue of SAN expense and complexity arises. Two recent developments, heavily driven by Microsoft, are helping to limit SAN complexity: Storage over IP or iSCSI and Simple SAN initiatives. The combination of both of these innovations helps to bring the advantages of high performance storage networking and high data availability, as well as newer storage technologies such as data replication, to small and medium businesses.
For more details on this subject, see Migrating From DAS to SAN.