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Summary of Best Practices for Storage Area Networks

A Summary of SAN Best Practices for Storage Area Networks

1 Introduction

Whether a SAN environment is simple or complex, many corporate SAN administrators

and their management, want to have a collection of general "rules of thumb" on best

practices in a single document. In general, a vast amount of best practices information

and “rules of thumb” currently exists, but these informational nuggets are scattered

across numerous documents, web sites and other sources. In most cases, these best

practices snippets are found within product-specific documentation and are not

necessarily presented from a solution viewpoint. Based on the historical experience of

various SAN Central team members, and others, a common question is “Where can I

find all of this information in one place?” This white paper is an attempt to bring a

number of these basic rules and their benefits towards effective SAN management

including change management techniques into one document.

This white paper will continue to be a work in progress as the storage industry evolves

with new products, enhanced product functions, changes with standards as well as new

pervasive issues are discovered and fixed. This white paper version does not go into

great detail from a server perspective nor does it include best practices with tape

storage and/or certain generic applications (such as data mirroring). This white paper is

also presented from an open systems point of view involving Fibre Channel protocol

(FCP). Later revisions will include IP storage based coverage as iSCSI (Internet SCSI)

and FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) continue to gain traction and assume a bigger

role within the data Center.

An extensive listing of references is provided to source publications used during the

writing of this paper. Otherwise, guidelines are based on information from SMEs plus a

few recommendations are based on customer situations which have been resolved with

assistance from the SAN Central and other IBM support teams. A conservative

approach with these best practice suggestions has been assumed which will lead to a

more proactive approach to SAN operations. These guidelines are not applicable to all

SAN environments nor are they intended to be a set of absolutes. The reader is invited

to use, or ignore, the following recommendations and suggestions where applicable to

their particular SAN environment.