Managed Storage Area Network (SAN) Solution
The massive volumes of data generated by on-line applications pose a serious challenge to the e-business or company that has outsourced the hosting of its business applications. How does one adequately manage the disk-storage requirements that the data explosion demands? Managing capacity by incrementally adding disks to your servers can be problematic. This also has a detrimental effect on uptime, and bearing in mind how unforgiving the e-commerce world is, disk failures are a disaster. GAMCO Hosting has built a service especially for customers who need the highest levels of redundancy and the ability to scale disk-storage demands on-the-fly.
What Is The Managed SAN Solution?
The Managed SAN Solution is a cost-effective and highly scalable disk-storage system, designed for business applications residing in the GAMCO Data Centres. The solution provides GAMCO Hosting customers with a fully configured Hewlett Packard fibre channel SAN that improves utilisation of disk capacity, simplifies storage management, increases performance and ensures seamless capacity expansion. The SAN hardware is shared amongst customers, guaranteeing a cost-effective service without compromising the technological benefits or security.
How Does The Managed SAN Work?
Hosted servers in the GAMCO Data Centres are connected to the fibre channel SAN by means of two network cards which are installed in your server(s). Your server runs the operating system and applications locally, but all file storage - without limit to the volume you may use - is managed by the SAN. A software agent is installed on each server to manage and control the SAN disks. Fibre channel provides redundant 2Gbps connectivity to the SAN ensuring automatic fail-over and the highest disk input/output speeds.
Solution Highlights
- Significant cost savings: the capital-intensive costs of purchasing and managing an equivalent infrastructure in our Data Centre or on your LAN are no longer a factor.
- Fully managed disk-quotas allow for easy scaling: GAMCO Hosting is able to increase your disk-space quotas at short notice. A management system informs us when you are running out of disk-space and we are able to notify you, and if required, provision additional space immediately.
- Robust infrastructure eliminates downtime: the SAN storage infrastructure has no single point of failure. Dual processors, fibre switches, power supplies and fail-over software loaded onto each server ensure automatic re-routing of connectivity to the next available switch should one fail.
- Data security: the shared SAN infrastructure imposes no security risks on your data. Each client is connected to the SAN on a private network. Private data cannot be seen by anyone you have not created access permissions for on your server.
- Enable server clustering: clusters require common disk-storage areas and attempting to achieve this via server-attached storage can be a challenge. The SAN is perfect for this task.
- Enhance your business continuity planning: as enhancements to the service, copies of data on the SAN can be efficiently migrated from disk to disk or disk to tape. It also enables server-less backup and easier data mirroring across different physical storage sites, improving your continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.
Solution Options
The Managed SAN service is provided with the following components which are needed per server that you connect to the SAN.
| Managed SAN Solution à Included With Monthly And Set-Up Service Charges | |
|---|---|
| HP StorageWorks EVA 5000 | This is the storage system and you will decide how much disk-space you need. |
| 2 x Fibre Channel Host Bus Adaptors (HBA) | These connect your server to the SAN network. Two HBAs are needed per server to support the dual (redundant) connectivity. |
| 2 Gbps Fibre Channel fabric | All cabling and necessary ports on the dual fibre channel switches are included. |
| HP OpenView Storage Area Manager (SAM) | The SAM is the software agent installed on your server. It manages and controls the disk-space on the SAN. One agent is needed per server. |
| Installation and configuration | Installation and configuration of server agent, fibre channel backbone and SAN disks. |
| Ongoing service management | The service is managed and supported by GAMCO. Monitoring of the SAN, disk quotas and utilisation is provided 24x7. |
GAMCO Hosting customers will need to decide on:
- Disk-space required: the SAN can support any requirement you may have, from a few gigabytes through to a number of Terabytes of storage space.
- Virtual RAID 1 or Virtual RAID 5: both of these data redundancy options are supported. Our engineers will be happy to advise you as to which is more suitable, if you are unsure.
- SAN-to-Tape backup service: GAMCO Hosting can offer an additional layer of data protection by backing up SAN data onto tape.
Pricing
| RAID 5 | RAID 10 | |
|---|---|---|
| Set-up Cost | R 6,000.00 | R 6,000.00 |
| Monthly Cost | R 3,850.00 | R 3,850.00 |
| Cost per GB | ||
| 1GB | R 68 | R 78 |
| 50GB | R 52 | R 62 |
| 100GB | R 45 | R 55 |
| 200GB | R 39 | R 49 |
| 300GB | R 34 | R 44 |
| 400GB | R 30 | R 40 |
| 500GB | R 29 | R 39 |
| 600GB | R 28 | R 38 |
| 800GB | R 27 | R 37 |
| 1,000GB | R 26 | R 36 |
All prices are quoted in ZAR, exclude VAT and are subject to GAMCO Terms and Conditions which are available on request. Quoted pricing is subject to change without notice. The contract period for the pricing quoted above is 18 months.