More articles by John Vacca

With SATA II products starting to emerge en masse, John Vacca's quintessential introduction to the Serial ATA interface has never been more relevant. Vacca reveals why the faster and smarter SATA interface offers much more than its parallel counterpart and examines what the new features will mean to the world of storage.

Now more than ever, enterprises face the daunting challenges of system reliability and availability, fast recovery from any changes or scheduled downtime, scalability and interoperability, data security, and the need to realize a lower total cost of ownership. John Vacca has a distinct answer for all of these potential pitfalls: Storage Area Networks (SANs).

The challenges resulting from the explosion of information that enterprises must overcome, and the importance of selecting and managing a storage solution that works to this end-to-end, are critical issues that must be successfully navigated by a company in order for it to maintain its competitive edge. John Vacca discusses the advantages and disadvantages of several existing storage solutions that are designed to help enterprises avoid the potential pitfalls associated with exponential information growth.

Advanced Storage Area Networks (SANs) help enable storage consolidation and deliver higher availability of critical enterprise data and applications, making them an excellent solution for addressing the explosion of data and its management. John Vacca takes an in-depth look at some of the primary drivers in the rapid adoption of SANs.

With the introduction of the fully public switch, creating and managing large SANs is now easier than ever before. As John Vacca explains in his latest article, full fabric-based switches allow storage managers to maximize the effectiveness of currently installed private loop devices via switch zoning capabilities and naming conventions.

SANs hold the promise of bringing significant business benefits to any enterprise, and, like any other paradigm shift in technology, they require a substantial financial investment in the process. John Vacca provides a high-level overview of the factors of ROI for SAN software and how the ROI can be predicted and analyzed.

John Vacca reveals the advantages of using a virtualized Storage Area Network to mask the detailed characteristics of network and storage devices in order to make consolidated SANs easier for administrators to manage.

John Vacca explains why the automated design and configuration of SANs is the only viable solution in an environment of increasing storage system costs and decreasing tolerance for mistakes.

Data migration doesn't allow for downtime or performance degradation, so any migration plan must minimize both. John Vacca explains how you can migrate data in the shortest-possible time with the least impact on your system performance.

Tired of a trial-and-error approach to SAN administration design and configuration? John Vacca details how you can automate the design and configuration process through the use of various tools.

Current UPS technology has been with us for over thirty years, but SAN hardware poses problems no one anticipated in 1965. John Vacca explains how to juggle the unique difficulties presented by UPS for SAN.

Like any other piece of critical computer hardware, your SAN should be adequately protected against power problems. Enterprise Storage regular John Vacca explains why there is a great deal more to selecting the right UPS than just buying a box full of batteries.

After years of anticipation, iSCSI products will start finding their way into server rooms over the next few months. What will this new storage technology mean for your business, and what are some of the things you should consider before implementation? John Vacca investigates.

In this, the next of our 'Storage in Depth' features, John Vacca looks at DAFS, a new commercial standard for file access that grew out of an industrial and academic consortium led by Network Appliance and Intel.

DWDM is one of the technologies making storage wide area networking possible, but while many administrators see the benefits of moving storage data over vast distances, few understand how the underlying technologies work. Enterprise Storage regular John Vacca takes an in-depth look at DWDM and details some practical examples of how it can be implemented.

John Vacca concludes his look at implementing a SAN with discussions of various topics, including SAN backup considerations, implementing SAN clustering, and the integration of SAN appliances.

John Vacca looks at the factors you should consider when planning a SAN implementation in this classic (and more relevant than ever) article on bringing your organization's e-business ambitions in line with its storage needs.

In this, the second part of a two-part article, John Vacca completes his look at the process of buying a SAN, including a discussion of specific SAN ROI Case Selections.

The move from a DAS to a SAN environment has many complex considerations. In this, the first part of a two-part article, John Vacca discusses some of the reasons why a SAN might make sense for your enterprise.

Completing his look at the basics of SAN security, John Vacca discusses the security of a Fibre Channel infrastructure and looks at some of the tools system administrators can use to enforce security policies.

With so much riding on your SAN, the security of your data should not be left to chance. In this, the first part of a two part tutorial on SAN security, John Vacca looks at some of the technologies and principles that you should consider when protecting your SAN.