Re: How does a SAN connect to a computer?

Brion L. Webster wrote:

How do you add more storage to a traditional server? Shut the server down, open the case, pray there are some free power connectors and data cables, add some more hard drives, power back on, double check the BIOS to make sure they're recognized, initialize the disks, format them, set up ACL permissions, shares, etc. With the SAN, you never have to crack your server, it stays running, the ACL stays in place, the shares are still there, the total capacity simply got bigger.

One possibly terrifying thing I forgot to mention in this scenario - assuming that your existing, traditional server has it's hard drives in a RAID array, how do you expand your RAID array? Most of the time you don't. Messing with the raid array breaks the raid, and destroys the data. So Step 1 should have been "bare metal back up the server", somewhere in there would be rebuild the RAID configuration, and restore the bare metal backup and pray it worked...

Expanding the RAID array on the SAN just doesn't have these issues. You have a RAID 5 group with 5 disks on it? You can expand it with more disks, or you can create a meta-group with two RAID 5 groups with 5 disks each. Either way the server keeps chugging.

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