SAN Consolidation

Simplify your infrastructure by consolidating onto a NetApp SAN.

As the number of supported applications and clients has grown in data centers, IT administrators have had to deploy multiple storage systems to support them. Frequently, these systems become a series of disparate SAN or DAS “islands,” which make data protection difficult, reduce utilization efficiency, and render provisioning highly time-consuming. The answer is the consolidation of these disparate systems onto a NetApp SAN.

NetApp provides a full range of SAN consolidation solutions for organizations concerned about increasing their storage utilization and allowing their administrators to increase the amount of storage they can manage. By offering both Fibre Channel and IP SAN (iSCSI) solutions, NetApp enables customers to consolidate either direct-attached storage or existing SANs onto the infrastructure best suited to their needs. This allows customers to deploy centralized storage pools and enhance application availability, reduce complexity, and lower costs. NetApp extends these consolidation values further by enabling SAN platforms to simultaneously support NAS capability on the same system. NetApp SAN consolidation provides:

• Simplified management.  Reduce the hours of administration time associated with managing many systems across the data center and instead manage a single device with one management console.
• Higher data availability and application uptime. When data is hosted on a consolidated NetApp SAN, that data and the applications it supports are easily protected with common policies and proven NetApp data protection tools.
• Higher storage utilization.  The poor capacity utilization experienced with many SAN or DAS islands is replaced with higher utilization enabled by a centralized storage pool.
• Consolidate third-party SANs.  With the NetApp V-Series product line, users can consolidate disparate third-party SANs, which eases management without requiring major infrastructure changes.
• Unified storage.  Because a single NetApp box can support Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS in a single box, consolidation with NetApp can extend beyond one type of SAN to virtually all types of network storage.