SAN Migration: The Need For Fast, Superior Data Storage Infrastructure

The amount of data used by Minnesota and North Dakota companies has been growing exponentially over the last few years. As a result, businesses like yours are looking for newer SAN options to give efficiency and scalability to the use and storage of data.

According to Forbes, people worldwide will generate an average of 1.37 megabytes per second of data by 2020. In fact, the planet’s population has created more data in the past two years than in the entirety of human history. As this trend continues, businesses need to be able to manage this amount of data in an efficient way if they want to stay competitive.

Along with the increase in the amount of data that is being created, we have also witnessed a decrease in the price of storage solutions coupled with an improvement in speed of storage devices.

That’s good news for you!

Recently, a client of the Insight Technologies team upgraded their old HP SAN solution to new, more efficient SAN solution.

The result?

Work that was taking them four to five hours to accomplish is now only taking forty minutes to complete!

While that kind of dramatic efficiency improvement isn’t typical of every SAN migration, it does point out the fact that there are benefits to be gained with a SAN migration.

In this article, we will demonstrate some of the benefits of migrating to a new, faster SAN solution.

Why Are Businesses Upgrading to the Latest HP SAN?

Data is critical to every business, so when deciding on the technology that is going to support your data needs, you need to be in good company. With over 500,000 units deployed worldwide, HP has been named #1 FC SAN platform for eight years in a row.

HP has been actively investing in the storage segment. With its $2.35 billion acquisition of 3PAR in 2010 and the Nimble Storage acquisition in 2017 for $1.2 billion, HP has improved its storage portfolio to stay up to date with the latest trends in storage technology. These investments, along with internal research and development has allowed HP to create a comprehensive offering of storage solutions, ranging from products aimed at small and midsize businesses to enterprise-grade solutions capable of handling massive critical workloads.

The Benefits of SAN Storage Networking

• Increased Backup Speed — With ports that can transfer data up to 32Gb/s, backups can be performed at a faster speed. We have seen performance improvements of more than
• Improved Resource Utilization — As a SAN makes your storage centralized, it can make more effective use of resources. Improved software capabilities make it easier to identify potential areas for resource optimization.
• Improved Disaster Recovery (DR) — If you are using SAN to SAN replication, you can recover from a disaster almost instantly. This allows businesses to reduce downtime and financial losses associated with unavailable systems.
• Improved Application Availability — SAN storage hardware can help you increase the availability and the quality of service of your applications by using a combination of aggregation and failover techniques.
• Improved Operations — Improved software utilities and out-of-the-box automation can speed up some administrative tasks and improve the server/admin ratio – reducing the administrative burden and improving your IT operations.

SAN Migrations: What You Need to Consider

• Know your environment: The first step of every migration is to document the current state of your IT infrastructure, you should understand your current environment from a hardware and software perspective. On the hardware side, you should know the characteristics of servers, switches, host bus adapters (HBA), port availability, along with the microcode and firmware levels of each component. On the software side, you should know the operating systems level, including installed patches, and the software components in place (databases, application servers).
• Evaluate the product service and support: As we stated at the beginning of the article, data is key to every business, so you have to make sure that your data storage solution has the support of a reputed vendor. HP SAN solutions and Insight Technologies experience can provide you with the support you need to execute a successful SAN migration.
• Evaluate the product interoperability: Interoperability of hardware solutions has improved considerably over the years. However, it is important to review any potential constraints that can exist between your existing IT infrastructure and your new storage solution. One of the goals of every migration should be to simplify operations. But if you end up with interoperability issues, it may increase the administrative burden.
• Evaluate the impact on your storage processes: Storage practices often rely on a set of predefined tasks and processes, you need to review how the capabilities of the new hardware and software may impact your day-to-day operations and storage tasks.
• Consider training needs: Any SAN upgrade may include major hardware and software upgrades, if you have internal IT Staff, you need to consider training as part of your migration process.

With more than 40 years helping companies address their IT challenges, Insight Technologies is the right choice when it comes to SAN migration services.

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