Evaluation Guide Overview
Evaluator Group’s SAN Storage Evaluation Guide is part of a series of guides designed to help IT professionals evaluate storage technology alternatives. This Evaluation Guide and the accompanying workbook are designed to assist potential buyers understand the options and products available and to help match requirements to the available technology choices.
What sets Evaluator Group’s Evaluation Guide series apart from vendor sponsored whitepapers is the lack of vendor bias. Our Evaluation Guides are not sponsored by vendors and are written for IT managers seeking a vendor neutral discussion of the design considerations behind new products, technologies, and trends.
What is SAN Storage
In this Evaluation Guide, SAN storage is defined as storage connected to servers by use of a storage area network or SAN for block access to data. This is distinguishable from connection over Ethernet as a NAS or Network Attached Storage for access to files or object storage object access. Many SAN storage systems also support file access as a NAS system as well. The NAS function is covered in the NAS Evaluation Guide while this guide focuses on the block access.
SAN storage may include solid state technology as well, in the form of SSDs or Solid-State Devices that mimic Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in form and protocol or with custom flash memory implementations. Systems that support both solid state and disk drives are covered in this Evaluation Guide.
Included in SAN storage is the use of NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express), a protocol that is memory-based, enabling reduction in overhead when using solid state technology. NVMe is used in attaching solid state devices to storage controllers and servers as well as a protocol over a storage network called NVMe over Fabric (NVMeoF).
SAN Storage Evaluation Guide contains:
- What is SAN Storage
- Critical Characteristics for SAN Storage Systems
- Evaluation Questions
- EvaluScale Requirements
- Summary
Download now to read this free Evaluation Guide.
