How do I Implement Storage Area Network

I have passed this on to my Son who works for a company called Sanrad - who specialise in SANs. Someone may contact you over this

Dave Wales

2 options:

- if only need to exchange infos on internal network get a NAS drive without ftp/samba protocol, will limit data exchanges within the local network

- if you need to exchange infos on internet, get a very good firewall/router + NAS drive with ftp/samba protocol

as it's a bank get a very good firewall ...

We purchased one for our historian data last year from

http://www.buffalotech.com/

It has been a fairly decent piece of equipment although I'm positive it wouldn't meet the security requirements that your bank requires. Security on the system is handled by an administrator, this person creates users, user groups, folders, etc. on the drive and determines who has access to what folders. This is all set up through a utility that is acccessed through Explorer, similar to what you would see on a Linksys router. Set up is very easy, we assigned it a static IP address on our network (ours is typically DHCP) and it basically worked from the beginning. It tends to lose the gateway address for no discernible reason at times but otherwise it has been trouble free for over a year. We have the drives on it set up as RAID 1.

You do not supply enough infos really for any good answers, may I suggest that you read some of the good books around and "Boff up" on the subject.

Beware of companies offering a "Complete Solution", I worked in this area for many years and even such companies as "I*M" and other big, big names make some very serious design failures.......I know, I was the one to go in and pick up the pieces and get it working correctly again!!!

Picking a solution on price means that you will probably take a cheap offer, that will run for anything up to 18 months, seeming problem free, before serious problems start to be noticed. In really badly designed systems this period of "working" can be as short as 6 moths!!

Generally, the "cheap" solutions ran about a year before the customer threw them out with massive data losses occurring was our experience....!!!

Make sure that you have a company/Consultant, that is not part of the "solution "company that will oversee your interests and fix problems before they happen, hopefully at the design stage, that was also part of my job in my last company, and what I still do for a living!!! This person will also control the contract for the solution and make sure that all the necessary clauses are included to hold the installing company to the parameters of performance and single points of failure that you have talked through with him!!!!

How big will the SAN be physically, within a KM or so or less, or will it stretch over the whole country?

What are the types of servers that need to be backed up?

What are your intentions for the final storage media? Tape or disk or something else?

On the answer to this and a few other questions that cannot be made until this answer is available, hangs the main design parameters of the SAN.