In a traditional enterprise information system, each data storage has to be bound to each server. As the amount of data to be handled by the syatem is doubling per year, the enterprise is increasingly suffering from the following problems.
A SAN is a high-speed network based on FC (fibre channel) which provides "any-to-any" connectivity between servers and storage. The SAN is highly expected to cut down TCO by storage consolidation and to improve system performance by high-speed data movement, such as data replication and backups, through FC.
SAN Solutions Laboratory (SNSL) has been developing SAN solutions called "Storage Server" whose examples are listed below.
Moves data directly from disk drives to tape devices without consuming cpu power of servers and bandwidth of a LAN.
Makes a copy of mainframe's data base which open systems can access for analytical applications such as data warehausing within a RAID.
Creates a computing environment where mainframes and open systems can directly read and write the same files.
This laboratory contributes the following activities for making standards.