Don't Let Fragmentation Add to SAN Complexity

BURBANK, CA, May 18 (MARKET WIRE) --
Storage Area Networks (SANs) are a great boon to enterprises everywhere.
Because a SAN removes network traffic from the production system, network
traffic is freed up to accommodate day-to-day operations -- themselves a
heavy load. SANs generally implement multiple physical disk drives in
some form of fault tolerant disk striping (RAID), and do provide a great
benefit to an enterprise: because stored data does not reside directly on
any of a network's servers, server power is utilized for business
applications and network capacity is released to the end user.

Connecting a machine to a SAN has always been a bit of a task -- it
normally has to be performed manually, and with today's heterogeneous
environments there has to be considerable know-how involved in the
machine's interaction with the SAN. It becomes even more complicated,
however, with the advent of virtual machines (VMs) -- for each VM, a
"relationship" must be established with the SAN. Since VMs can now be
created and deleted on-the-fly by the users themselves, automated
solutions are now appearing that will allow VMs to be automatically
connected. Whether this will be a workable solution or not remains to be
seen, but obviously something needs to happen to make this operation
efficient.

File fragmentation already negatively affects SAN performance, if not
fully addressed with an automatic solution. Physical members in a SAN
environment are not read or written to directly by an application, but
instead are "seen" by an application and even the OS as one single
"logical" drive. When an I/O request is processed by the file system,
there are a number of attributes that must be checked which cost valuable
system time. If an application has to issue multiple "unnecessary" I/O
requests, as in the case of fragmentation, not only is the processor kept
busier than needed, but once the I/O request has been issued, the RAID
hardware and software must process it and determine to which physical
member the I/O request must be directed. When files are fragmented into
hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of fragments (not at all
uncommon), there are obviously many more extra I/O requests. Performance
slows to a crawl.

With all that must be done to keep a SAN up and running and to ensure all
machines and applications are connected, IT personnel cannot afford to be
chasing down and addressing symptoms of file fragmentation. Especially
with the addition of VMs, there is already enough to do. Fragmentation
must be constantly addressed so that is simply eliminated -- a task that
can only be performed with a fully automatic solution. Such a
defragmenter works invisibly, in the background, with no negative impact
on system processes and -- best of all -- no required scheduling by IT
personnel.

Don't let fragmentation add to SAN complexity. Make sure your defrag
solution allows you to address factors that truly need addressing.

Contact:
Bruce Boyers Marketing Services
Email: info@boyersmarketing.com

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