University Report: Storage Network Solution for Ammylife.com

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution tailored for Ammylife.com, addressing its varying storage and processing needs. The report begins by outlining the network requirements and justifying them with a network architecture diagram, emphasizing the importance of SANs for businesses with diverse workloads. It then delves into crucial aspects like scalability, performance, availability, management, and connectivity, highlighting how a SAN can benefit AmMyLife.com. The discussion includes backup and recovery strategies, investment considerations, and the advantages of implementing a centralized storage system. The report covers the use of fibre channel technology and the advantages of implementing a SAN network, concluding with an overview of the findings and recommendations for AmMyLife.com.

Running head: STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
Storage Network Solution for Ammylife.com
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
Summary
The importance of Storage Area Networks (SAN) to businesses requiring varying workloads
and storage needs is noted by industry leader IBM (International Business Machine) and
suggests in favour of incorporating interconnected network architectures like SAN to deal
with these challenges. This report identifies and discusses the network requirements and
justifies them with the help of suggested network architecture diagram. Then the report
touches on scalability and performance, availability, management, connectivity, backup and
recovery and investment where it apart from talking about benefits it is also explained on
how such networks can benefit a business like AmMyLife.com. Thereafter the report ends
with concluding notes.

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Solution Requirements...............................................................................................................3
Justification................................................................................................................................5
Scalability and Performance......................................................................................................6
Availability.................................................................................................................................7
Management...............................................................................................................................7
Connectivity...............................................................................................................................7
Backup/Recovery.......................................................................................................................8
Investment..................................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References..................................................................................................................................9

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
Introduction
Importance of Storage Area Networks (SAN) towards a business that requires varying
workloads and storage needs as noted by industry leader IBM (International Business
Machine) and suggests in favour of incorporating interconnected network architectures like
SAN to deal with these challenges.
The report begins by identifying and discussing the network requirements and
justifies them with the help of suggested network architecture diagram. Then the report
touches on scalability and performance, availability, management, connectivity, backup and
recovery and investment where it apart from talking about benefits it is also explained on
how such networks can benefit a business like AmMyLife.com. After that the report ends
with observations in the conclusions section.
Solution Requirements
The primary requirements of AmMyLife.com is to implement the right technologies
to their network to address the varying storage and processing needs of the website. This data
is mostly shared by the two servers for Web hosting and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
Storage area networks are the storage media platforms that can be used for disk
storage purposes in business computing environments. In addition, fibre channel storage area
networks or SAN are specialized high speed networks which attach storage devices with the
servers (Kenawell et al. 2016). To implement such a storage area network, the following
requirements need to be met. These are:
When Storage Area Networks are employed for connecting the host servers and disks to the
storage systems, all storage devices operating with the storage system should be viewable to
the hosts.

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
If the system supports I/O adapter and the device adapters to operate concurrently, it must be
ensured that the SAN provides access to both hosts and devices.
It is a must to configure the I/O adapters of Fibre channels for operating in the mode of point
to point topology.
Fibre channel based SAN solutions also provide capabilities like interconnecting open
systems as also storages present in same networks.
One Fibre channel I/O adapter can physically address two or more Fibre channel ports on
storage systems.

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Justification
Figure 1: SAN implementation in an Enterprise
The above diagram represents the typical network layout for Storage Area Networks
in business organizations. It is clear from the diagram that SAN works as interconnecting
hubs between the storage devices and the servers of the overall network. The purpose of

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
using SAN is to obtain the key benefits of using Storage Area Network (SAN) like improved
utilization of storage disks (Wu et al. 2017). Here storage spaces are organized in a
centralized manner allowing all nodes of the network to be managed as one entity. This just
allows one to own the potential of mustering several resource pools for storage installed in
different levels of the network. On top of this, the storage is assigned to selected or all server
applications. Absence of these SAN storage leads to extra investment of acquiring a large
number of hard drives and disks for installation on some very expensive servers.
Here the workstations are connected to an Ethernet switch which also connects the
webserver for hosting AmMyLife.com as well as the FTP server (Siahaan et al. 2018). These
servers are connected with the required storage devices through the SAN.
Scalability and Performance
At present, the web servers are severely limited when it comes to scaling of storage
components. Such issues can rise from storage devices that are directly connected via I/O
channels to the directly attached storage devices.
Switched fibre channel SANs like the one represented by the diagram solves this
scalability problems in the following ways:
 The reliance on open systems model for storage requirements of the network provides
businesses with best price to performance network operations in a level playing field.
 The independent scaling of storage and processing capacities isolates the storage units
and the servers in order to ensure separate scaling if required.
 SANs support migration to other networks and the applications do not need changes
run after migration
 A centralized framework enables monitoring and management of the entire storage
making it easy add or configure storage devices.

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Availability
In the event of problems arising among host bus adapters or HBA, cables or switching ports,
or if the servers and storage devices are unavailable, it can lead to the entire web applications
of AmMyLife.com getting disabled causing significant downtimes. Currently SANs make use
of a mix between aggregation as well as failover methods for improving reliability and
availability as also load balancing redundancy and faster performance (Chang and Wills
2016).
Management
The SAN networks are managed by employing collective measures, tools and
processes for enabling administration, maintenance and operation of SAN infrastructure. For
AmMyLife, the web server and the ftp server are the key components of the network. The
storage requirements of this website is not always fixed and can sometimes exceed what is
available on one of the installed physical servers. For this reason the data is stored in separate
storage devices and hard disks which are interconnected with the web and ftp server using
SAN.
This helps the business in planning for expansion in future, support virtualisation
through cloud based services, infrastructure management, capacity-management, backup
management, creating RAID levels and managing them as also in monitoring the usage (Sun
and Ansari 2017).
Connectivity
The workstations and clients as also the servers of the business are connected over
Local Area Network (LAN) in physical star topology through an Ethernet switch (Kizilov et
al. 2016). The storage devices are connected to the SAN device through the fibre channel
ports and adapters (Tao et al. 2019). The SAN device is in turn connected to the servers.

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STORAGE NETWORK SOLUTION FOR AMMYLIFE.COM
Backup/Recovery
Multiple storage devices are installed in the SAN network and these devices apart
from containing the requisite operational data also stores configuration and diagnostic data of
all the critical devices of the network. Whenever such a device fails, the system is rebooted
with the correct configuration obtained from the storage devices.
Investment
The SAN device used to implement can cost up to $1300. The servers being used for
web hosting and FTP purposes can cost $900 each. The workstations can cost $350 per unit.
Though the Ethernet cables and switches can be acquired within $50, Fibre channel switches
and adapters can cost around $300 (Voss and Flanagan 2018). Add to these the various hard
disks and data stores and the cost of setting up the network can reach $5000.
Conclusion
In conclusion the report successfully identifies requirements of the business and
recommends Storage Area Networks (SAN) based network as the business requires varying
workloads and storage in accordance to industry leader IBM (International Business
Machine) who suggests in favour of incorporating interconnected network architectures like
SAN to deal with such challenges. The report is observed to identify and discuss the
networking requirements and justifies them with the help of suggested network architecture
diagram. Then the report touches on scalability and performance, availability, management,
connectivity, backup and recovery and investment where it apart from talking about benefits
it is also explained on how such networks can benefit a business like AmMyLife.com.

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References
Chang, V. and Wills, G., 2016. A model to compare cloud and non-cloud storage of Big
Data. Future Generation Computer Systems, 57, pp.56-76.
Kenawell, B., Phelan, B., Sherbondy, K.D. and Narayanan, R., 2016. QNAP 1263U Network
Attached Storage (NAS)/Storage Area Network (SAN) Device Users Guide (No. ARL-TN-
0804). Army Research Laboratory Adelphi United States.
Kizilov, E., Konnov, N., Nikishin, K., Pashchenko, D. and Trokoz, D., 2016. Scheduling
queues in the Ethernet switch, considering the waiting time of frames. In MATEC Web of
Conferences (Vol. 44, p. 01011). EDP Sciences.
Siahaan, A.P.U., Rahim, R., Aryza, S., Djanggih, H. and Sir, A.R.S., 2018. Prototype File
Transfer Protocol Application for LAN and Wi-Fi Communication.
Sun, X. and Ansari, N., 2017. Green cloudlet network: A distributed green mobile cloud
network. IEEE Network, 31(1), pp.64-70.
Tao, F., Tang, Y., Zou, X. and Qi, Q., 2019. A field programmable gate array implemented
fibre channel switch for big data communication towards smart manufacturing. Robotics and
Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 57, pp.166-181.
Voss, T.J. and Flanagan, T., 2018. Fibre Channel Development Final Report CRADA No.
TC-0340-92-C (No. LLNL-TR-747669). Lawrence Livermore National Lab.(LLNL),
Livermore, CA (United States).
Wu, Y., Wang, F., Hua, Y., Feng, D., Hu, Y., Tong, W., Liu, J. and He, D., 2017. I/O Stack
Optimization for Efficient and Scalable Access in FCoE-Based SAN Storage. IEEE
Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 28(9), pp.2514-2526.