Other major benefits of a SAN
You can add storage to any particular node that requires it.
Traditionally if you have 100 servers each with say a 9gb disk (this
is an example ok). then you have 900Gb of disk cost. However some of
that disk will be full to bursting and others will hardly have 5% used.
Put all the disk in a SAN and you can allocate (and re-allocate
dynamically) your disk space where you need it.
If you lose a server for any reason you can bring a spare on-line by
pointing it's boot prom at the same location on the SAN. (assuming you
do have some sanity to your hardware purchase policy and buy like kit
rather than 100 individual examples of every hardware type know to man
kind).
Backup, performing a nightly backup of all those servers over 100mb
ether represents a big network hit. The SAN provides a seperate
1Gb channel to do that on and as mentioned earlier you can do backups
more frequently till you reach the logical conclusion of a live mirror.
P.
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