SAN may not be an easy task to manage and optimize, especially if it is a data center storage area network. As information proliferation becomes the norm and data exigencies rise, leveraging SANs becomes paramount for organizations.
Whether you are employing more modern technologies or simply trying to improve your data center architecture, operations, or capacity planning, these hints will aid you in getting the most from your investments in storage infrastructure.
Below are 12 tips that one needs to adopt and implement to maximize his or her data center SAN’s capability and efficiency.
1. Conduct a Storage Assessment
The first and most important step towards optimizing any data center SAN is to get a clear understanding of how well or badly storage services are used within an organization, how well or badly they perform, and whether or not the available storage services can accommodate the current and future storage needs of the organization. Carrying out a holistic evaluation checks your workloads, data sets, networks, and infrastructure along the stack. It allows you to come up with an optimization strategy that suits your environment by helping you identify what needs to be optimized.
2. Implement Storage Tiering
If you have control over workloads, you can use intelligent storage tiering to enhance performance while at the same time reducing costs. Storage tiering involves the act of placing different data on different storage media within the SAN depending on access frequencies, backup/recovery time, and costs.
3. Upgrade Aging Infrastructure
As you might know, if the current Storage Area Network infrastructure has become obsolete, then the installation of modern storage technology can offer huge benefits. Some of the innovations that are incorporated in the newer generation SANs include increased throughput, low latency, efficient disk use, unified storage, and flash. Consider the pros and cons, including the costs and benefits of all-flash arrays or converged systems, should your workloads demand the benefits.
4. Migrate to High-Speed Fabric
data center services SAN network architecture and fabric are another determinant factor that has a significant influence on SAN performance. Upgrading from the previous generation 8 Gbps or 10 Gbps Fibre Channel can mean a two- or four-fold increase in data transfer rate. Therefore, this enables your infrastructure to scale up to support more storage, hosts, and higher-capacity drives.
Higher-speed fiber channel options include:
- 16 Gbps FC: Cost-effective enhancement over 8 Gbps, as well as supporting existing SAN architectures.
- 32 Gbps FC: Designed for emerging workloads with large throughput requirements
- 100 Gbps Ethernet: Utilizes the data center IP network switching for SAN connectivity.
All of them have benefits, and all of them should be thoroughly analyzed to choose the option that is best for the specific problem. Consult current issues of bottlenecks, future bandwidth demand, and data center service strategies before implementation.
5. Follow SAN Zoning Best Practice
SAN zoning also offers the functionality of access control to store resources by creating logical groups of storage resources accessible to servers. The existence of best practices guides the performance and stability of zoning policies. Recommendations include:
- Start small: When narrow zoning policies have been adopted, then allocate the minimum resources necessary.
- Separate high, medium, and low bandwidth zones: If you are doing both heavy workloads and low-throughput workloads, it is advisable to separate them.
- Set hard limits per zone: Cap the active path or initiators to prevent the condition where more traffic is initiated than can be handled in the network.
6. Size SAN Cache Appropriately
That is why tuning the storage area network cache regarding workloads is the primary method of achieving a great result in the improvement of storage performance. A cache is a high-speed memory that holds copies of the most frequently accessed data or the data that is currently being accessed, as well as hot reads and writes. The increasing cache sizes are good if only they can be properly sized to increase the hit ratios.
- Evaluate cache metrics to determine: Evaluate cache metrics to determine:
- Hit rate percent: The higher the percentage represented by Y, the better, with 90% being optimal.
- Misses per second: Where lower is better, it indicates that the lower the score, the better; conversely, where higher is better, it means that the higher the score, the better.
7. Optimize RAID Configurations
Striking an optimum balance for the Storage Area Network storage RAID groups can help to do away with performance degradation based on bad stripe width created without regard to workloads. Configure RAID groups in the appropriate stripe width according to the I/O pattern.
8. Choose Performance Drives
Disc technology is still improving, with 15K RPM FC drives migrating to more capacity 10K RPMs, while flash SSDs are widely used. New drive technologies also provide increased I/O, bandwidth, and reduced latency.
Compare and select between SAS, directly attached NL-SAS, SATA SSD, and PCIe flash drives that deliver 2–10 times performance improvement for your workloads and investment costs. For instance, observe how random I/O, which is an ideal use case for flash, benefits more than sequential I/O.
9. Consolidate Data by Reducing Copies
Data progression is inherently a performance issue in SAN because of contention and bottlenecks. The elimination of duplicate copies of data, data duplication, and consolidation of data on the SAN reduces the footprints of data on the system, thus enhancing efficiency.
The integration of SAN islands with other legacy storage into new unified arrays helps in the optimization and control of the systems. Similarly, the migration of applications from direct attached storage onto the SAN results in a reduction of infrastructure.
10. Set Performance Alert Thresholds
Consider using IOPS, MBps, latency, queue depth, and CPU utilization rate as key parameters alongside cache efficiency and fabric errors. Set early warning and critical level which will provide enough time to tackle probable constraints.
Assess each subsystem at the SAN individual level in addition to the collective level. Task: take advantage of monitoring tools that have historical charts, which simplifies the identification of odd shapes that depict potentially emerging problems.
11. Improve Tracking and Reporting
When combined with data center solutions monitoring, the visibility provided by enhancing operational processes related to tracking inventory, assets, warranty status, and preparing reports offers significant benefits. Monthly reports should indicate actual and potential capacity, growth rates, utilization and performance, bandwidth, planned maintenance, and end-of-life equipment.
It supports decision-making on usage patterns, refresh cycles, maintenance intervals, and tech refreshments. Optimized work procedures result in minimized outage likelihoods and the possibility of automation.
12. Forecast Performance Needs
With data growth rates, it is crucial to forecast your future SAN networking, storage, caching, and infrastructure needs for the next 2-3 years at the very least.
Assess the existing workload, growth rates, and data center projections currently in use. Include new applications that are being rolled out, current and future VMs and container requirements, expected database sizes, number of users, and planned projects. Forecast future states and model various designs based on projections to match infrastructure appropriately.
Conclusion
Since there is constant pressure on the SAN infrastructure, it is important to make your data center storage area network work more effectively, and this is precisely what some of the key solutions aimed at are. To achieve this, one can take advantage of faster fabrics for storage connectivity by deploying tiered storage, optimizing caching, workload balancing, and using forecasting models.
