Overview

What This Chapter Will Do For You

This chapter looks at important aspects involved with designing a storage network of various sizes, including assessment, analysis, and design. Some of the items you will learn about in this chapter include:

• A bad design can lead to a bad implementation, which impacts data availability

• Understand your needs and objectives so that you know when they have been met

• Good information leads to good decisions; know your storage environment

• Get your partners to work with and for you and reward them for helping to meet your objectives

• Obtain management endorsement and buy-in, and determine what they need for success

8.1 Overview

This chapter looks at storage networking design from simple to complex and from local to wide area. Design of a storage network can be as varied as the environments and applications they will support. Storage networking design involves having clear objectives, understanding business needs, assessing resources, analyzing information, documenting the design, and implementing it. This chapter contains many lists that can be used to create checklists, information worksheets, and comparison sheets for evaluating technology.

8.2 Getting started

As part of the storage networking design process, depending on what the scope is, you may decide to assemble a team of people from different groups, including networking, storage management, server management, applications, database management, and security. For smaller environments, perhaps you are the person responsible for pulling everything together. For larger storage networks a team can be useful to divide up the assessment...