SAN Concepts & Architecture is a one-day crash course on SAN technology, specifically designed for people who have a working knowledge of computer networks and server hardware. This class was originally designed to educate network architects and other IT decision-makers on SAN technology so that they would be better prepared to plan their own site's migration to Storage Area Networks. Originally entitled "Anticipating SANs," this class has been modified to suit a broader audience that includes consultants, technical industry analysts, and system engineers.

Our class begins by defining the problems of storage management in technical terms rather than through industry trend analysis. We then provide a simple technical definition of Storage Area Networks, followed by a discussion of the common components that make up a SAN and the features to look for in those components. After completing the discussion of the SAN infrastructure, we move on to the applications that bring a SAN to life. These include disk storage optimization, backup and recovery, server clustering, and storage service provisioning.

We have had a number of requests from financial analysts regarding on-site presentations of this material. If you are interested in having this presentation delivered at your site, please email us.

Intended Audience

• IT Directors
• Network Administrators
• Backup System Administrators
• UNIX Sys Admins
• Technical Salespeople and Systems Engineers
• Industry Analysts
• Consultants and Integrators

Prerequisites

• Hands-on familiarity with Ethernet networks
• Basic familiarity with SCSI and server hardware
• No prior knowledge of SANs is assumed

Topics Covered

• Technical discussion of the problems of traditional data storage
• The evolution of conventional storage technology into SANs
• The SAN Infrastructure (What's inside the cloud?)
  • Essential, but obscure SCSI knowledge
  • Essentials of Fibre Channel
  • Fibre Channel loops and fabrics
  • The components of the SAN
• SAN Partitioning
  • Zoning and LUN masking
  • Security and fool-proofing
• SAN Applications
  • Disk storage- 5 ways to share disk on a SAN
  • Disk virtualization
• Backup Applications
  • LAN-Free backup
  • Serverless backup
  • Clientless backup
• Other SAN topics
  • NAS v. SAN- a technical perspective
  • The convergence of NAS and SAN
  • SCSI over IP and wide-area SAN technologies