SAN Technology Offers Affordable, Efficient Data Storage

Storage area network (SAN) technology has been around since the late 1990s, but only recently has the cost of SAN arrays made the technology affordable for for smaller IT departments. According to this PC World report, with a storage area network, however, you buy only as much storage as you initially need, and then expand as you go. This save your company money in hardware costs and energy consumption, and it reduces IT personnel workload and system downtime.

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"A key feature of SANs is 'thin provisioning,' which in effect lets you lie to your server about how much storage is available to it. For example, you can fool each of five servers into thinking that it has 16TB (terabytes) of dedicated storage available when in reality your SAN has a total of just 2TB of actual disk space.

"Of course, you’ll still have to add drives to your storage area network as your total data approaches capacity, but thin provisioning helps you avoid wasting space on underutilized servers or creating new partitions each time you add a physical disk."

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