Things to Consider when Looking for SAN Storage

Over the last few months I've been working with my team and others to design our next generation of SAN storage for my company. Sounds simple, right? Sure. I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale too.

So how do you go about designing what your next storage system should be? This answer should be different for almost everyone. Let me share the process that I've recently gone through.

When I started my job in April of 2011, I was given the task of evaluating each system and its related components so that we could have a baseline "inventory" of what my group does. We'll call this my "Systems Service Catalog".  This was very enlightening for me, as I was operating in a completely different environment than I had with my previous job. Anyway, based on creating this document, several needs were discovered, with storage being one of them.

So, having determined storage was an issue that would need to be addressed in the coming fiscal year, I began to do a few things:

1. Held meetings to discuss and understand how we were currently using our storage
2. Discussed with the team what we WANTED to do with our storage environment
3. The team documented what the "pain points" were with the existing storage
4. Met with executive leadership to determine business requirements as it related to any system that had data or otherwise utilized our SAN (Virtual Machines for example)
5. Asked executive leadership to determine what their SLA's were for the systems and applications that utilized the SAN (i.e., if this particular system is unavailable for 4 hours, is that a problem for you?)
6. Attempted (and still attempting) to determine retention requirements for each system and medium that utilizes the SAN (how long do we keep video, documents, log files, etc.)

From here, I began to gather all the information from these meetings and discussions to arrive at an acceptable storage solution that was sized to be able to grow and had adequate amounts of tiered storage.

Some things I learned along the way...

It's certainly much easier to go to vendor and just say, "Hey, I want highly available storage for 2 data centers so that I can replicate my data between the two and not have to worry too much if one data center dies. Oh, and I want my down time to be no more than 15 minutes. Whatcha got for that?" and just wait for them to send me a great and wonderful quote.

Sorry, that won't fly here...

So here's what I learned:

1. Tell your vendor explicitly what you would like to have and what you must have and have them ITEMIZE your quotes so you can easily take them out
2.  Make sure the vendor understands which items are options and requirements if you are building a budgetary quote. Removing some items can raise your costs.
3. Understand your business requirements for storage. I don't know about you, but it isn't the IT department's job to create most business requirements. My job is to deliver the appropriate solutions based on their needs.
4. Policies regarding retention of files and video are essential. If you know you need to keep 30 days of video for all or some of your video surveillance, that will certainly change how much storage you need to plan for. 
5. Know what your SLA's are or RTS (return to service) requirements are. If you don't need 24x7x365 availability and can handle a few hours of downtime, then don't spend the money on that functionality. It will save you a lot of money!

In the end, I was able to get a mid-range system spec'd out that has the capability to be changed into a highly available system and add more storage fairly easily. Now, all I have to do is convince those that create the budgets that this is what they need. Always fun!