Understanding SAN Storage Performance for Optimal Data Management

For organizations that deal with massive amounts of data, Storage Area Networks (SANs) can be a lifesaver. Among their benefits include the ability to unify data storage, freeing up local storage, minimization of data redundancies, centralized and secured data management, among others. However, without proper management, SAN storage performance can quickly become a bottleneck and lead to costly downtime, unexpected outages, and a generally compromised IT infrastructure. In this blog, we’ll delve into everything you need to know about SAN storage performance so you can ensure the optimal data management of your organization.

 

Understand the Technology Involved

At the most basic level, a SAN is a dedicated network interconnected to a datacenter that serves as storage for multiple devices and hosts. In this setup, the actual network infrastructure is separate from the server infrastructure, effectively unifying the storage resources. The storage devices can be connected to the network via a fibre-channel (FC) protocol, a more modern iSCSI protocol, Fibre-Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE), and others. Each protocol type has its own strengths and weaknesses, and depending on your enterprise needs, each may be suitable for different device-centric data requirements.

 

Understand the Components of SAN Performance

Several factors affect the performance of a SAN. These include:

 

Network Congestion: Congestion can cause poor response times and connection losses. It can be caused by overloaded or poorly-designed switches, excessive traffic, bottlenecks between the storage and the servers, etc. Identify these issues and take appropriate steps to troubleshoot the same.

 

Disk I/O Bottlenecks: These result from latency issues or from an inadequate number of disks. Ideally, an enterprise should aim for an IOPS (I/O operations per second) level of a minimum of 500, depending on various use cases.

 

Controller CPU Utilization: A SAN controller manages the storage, and high CPU utilization can slow down a SAN. Consistently high utilization indicates it might be time to upgrade or optimize the controller.

 

Relative Performance of Application Components: SAN storage is optimized for storage-intensive tasks, and applications may have different storage requirements. By understanding and optimizing the performance of individual application components, you can minimize latency issues and reduce bottlenecks.

 

Monitor SAN Performance

While proactive management is key to preventing bottlenecks, it’s important to have systems in place that are set up to monitor and alert you to performance issues. Through monitoring, you can identify issues early on and troubleshoot them before they magnify, leading to system outages or more expensive downtime. Some best practices in monitoring SAN storage performance include:

 

Capture actual and estimated IOPS information

Monitor network latency

Track CPU utilization and memory usage

Leverage Automation

 

Managing data storage on a SAN can be a daunting task, especially if dealing with large volumes of data. Fortunately, there are several tools that can aid you in SAN performance monitoring and management, minimizing the workload and preventing performance issues for your organization. These include automation tools which monitors your SAN environment continuously and provides insights into issues that might affect performance.

 

Conclusion

The optimal storage performance of a SAN solution is critical to an enterprise’s operations. It should be the gold-standard for data storage and management, but it’s important to acknowledge and understand some of the significant issues that might lead to a bottleneck in performance—network congestion, disk I/O bottlenecks, high CPU utilization, and ineffective application performance. Monitoring and system automation are key pillars in preventive maintenance for your organization. By being proactive in your approach and addressing performance issues as they arise, you can easily avoid unexpected downtime, outages, and reputational damage, and manage your data seamlessly to support your business’s growth possibilities.