Top 5 Things You Should Know About SAN Fiber Systems

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a critical part of most data centers. If the SAN goes down business, grinds to a halt, because the SAN allows access to all the stored information.

This could be in the form of customer information, technical documentation, employee records, payroll information and so on.  It is essentially the access point to the library of information that a business or entity owns. As the saying goes “knowledge is power”, but if you can’t access the knowledge, then you are powerless!

SAN environments in the data center require large amounts of bandwidth, low latency and high speeds.

This makes fiber optic cabling a perfect fit for SAN’s. Most enterprise class SAN’s run the fibre channel protocol which requires high amounts of fiber connectivity.

Even though many products look alike, not all SAN fiber is created equal.

Here are the top 5 things you should understand about SAN fiber cabling systems.

1. Performance

Look for the maximum insertion loss, measured in dB, of the fiber assemblies. The lower the better. The better this performance, the more “headroom” you will have. Conversely, if you have inferior performing cables, you will be susceptible to outages and “ghost issues”. Don’t be fooled by “typical” loss amounts, as the product you get could be higher than that.

2. Repeatability

Use a trusted name and ask for documentation about a the SAN fiber product’s performance not only the 1^st time it is plugged in, but the 100^th time. It is one thing for a cable to work well at the point of factory assembly testing, but the rigors of the real world data center need to be accounted for!

Most SAN fiber cable failures happen right out of the bag OR after 20 plug ins. The latter being the most dangerous as a bad cable is the often the last thought in this instance.

3. Design

With the large amounts of SAN fiber cabling comes the potential for cable management challenges… aka “cable spaghetti”. Look at offerings that address this with design methods to reduce bulk cordage. Look for a manufacturing partner that will assist you with the specific design challenges of your SAN, as no two are alike!

4. Scalability

Related to design, scalability addresses the entire structured systems ability to change is your needs change. Connector types and speeds change frequently. Make sure your system can grow and change as quickly as you do.

5. Return on Investment

This wraps everything into one package. Look at your SAN cabling infrastructure as an investment instead of a cost. Weigh all these factors together to build a cabling infrastructure that will last for generations of hardware.

It is never too late to start doing this the right way versus being in a position of constantly reacting to moves, adds and changes and project based requirements. Saving costs in these scenarios ends up costing you more due to SAN outages that happen if you don’t follow these key points!