As organizations around the globe search for ways to improve the availability of critical enterprise data, they are increasingly turning to Storage Area Networks (SANs). Many organizations have already realized the significant advantages SANs can provide as a vital component of a strategic business continuance solution.

With their ability to integrate innovative devices and applications, SANs provide many high-availability options for organizations that need to support a wide range of business continuance activities in a cost-efficient manner. In particular, the distributed networked approach of SANs addresses one of the most critical factors in any disaster-ready storage environment: the ability to recover data and quickly bring systems back online following a disaster. Without this level of protection even minutes of downtime can pose significant consequences to many types of organizations (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Financial impact of system failure (average hourly cost by type of application)

To guard against such downtime and to reduce business risk, a viable SAN solution must address all facets of business continuance requirements, such as:

• Eliminate single points of failure to increase system resiliency and maximize data availability
• Incorporate failover software to prevent or better tolerate system outages
• Streamline data backup and recovery processes to reduce the time to recovery
• Enable high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting, and mirroring at data centers separated by great distances

Data access over long distances is a key component of any business continuance solution. Native Fibre Channel technology provides extended distance connectivity of up to 120 km. This distance enables enterprise customers to maintain geographically separate disaster recovery facilities or mirroring operations. When used in Large Fabric configurations, SANs can utilize Wide Area Networks (WANs) or Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) to cover even longer distances (see Figure 2).
Figure2. A MAN with native Fibre Channel connections over longer distances

Today, organizations that deploy SAN fabrics are strategically positioned to achieve maximum business continuance. As a result, these organizations are receiving excellent returns on their technology investment and the assurance that their enterprise data and business operations are well protected.

For example, a large private-sector bank recently implemented one of Europe's largest fully redundant, heterogeneous SAN environments based entirely on 20 Brocade 2800 16-port fabric switches. The result is a high-availability computing system that networks more than 320 Fibre Channel devices. The SAN deployment features extended distance connectivity, which enables the backup site to be located 35 km from the main data center.