CIS 505 Week 7 Case Study Carlson Companies

Carlson Companies

CIS 505- Communication Technologies

Strayer University, Alexandria, VA.

Assess how the Carlson SAN approach would be implemented in today’s environment.

Carlson’s IT organization first concluded that it required a SAN. The company’s Shared Services group, which provides IT services for all of Carlson’s companies, evaluated Fiber Channel and IP options for building the SAN. “One of the biggest issues we wanted to address from a corporate point of view was to provide storage services to our remote offices,” says Price, “and one of their biggest problems was backup and recovery. We wanted to expand outside our data center, globally, for all our remote offices and data centers.” Carlson’s IT group determined that the initial costs of going with Fiber Channel would have been about the same as with IP, but that the IP approach would save money over the long run.

In the same way as other IT staff confronted with exponential space development, Norman Owens understood a couple of years back that his organization was set out toward a test in the event that it didn’t begin merging its space assets onto a space range system (San). In formulating a global IT strategy for networking and storage, the Carlson storage architects began with their current applications and the supporting server/storage infrastructure. Originally, Carlson’s business applications were supported on a combination of direct-attached storage arrays and internal storage .Database applications ran on servers attached to large storage arrays, and other applications ran on servers with internal storage. Overlaid on the SNIA Shared Storage Model, Carlson Companies’ original storage configuration clearly demarcates which applications access data via records, which via files, and which via device-level block aggregation or host-supported block aggregation. The first step in determining which applications might be better served by shared storage and which shared storage technologies are most appropriate for specific upper-layer applications is to diagram the upper-layer applications and their storage access methods.

Compare the pros and cons of consolidating data on a SAN central data facility versus the dispersed arrangement it replaces.

Storage area networks provide connectivity to the virtual server using either the Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI protocols. SAN storage is sharable, resources may be easily shared between multiple virtual server hardware devices. This is important in clustered virtual server environments. SANs are highly scalable, both from a capacity and performance perspective. For large deployments of virtual servers, scalability is extremely important and the whole premise of SAN is to provide high levels of scale. SAN storage provides synchronous replication. Synchronous replication isn’t typically available on NAS implementations, and for many environments, this may be a key requirement for a disaster recovery strategy. SAN environments are highly resilient. SAN environments are well equipped with dual fabrics, HBAs and highly available storage arrays.

Dispersal as a Resource1 Emmanuel Ma Mung Migrinter, CNRS, Universities of Poitiers and Bordeaux Dispersal as a Resource How can the geographic dispersion of a social entity. The dispersion can then be used to accomplish things that would otherwise be beyond one’s means. When a certain spatial arrangement is the key to accomplishments that would be difficult to achieve in another situation, the spatial arrangement becomes an asset. Indeed, it also becomes a social arrangement, because this spatial arrangement may become the argument that justifies a certain way of conceiving oneself as a social entity. Therefore, a spatial resource can be defined as a spatial arrangement that is available for the subjects of dispersion to use for their personal benefit. The dispersed approach leads to duplicated support costs and greater exposure to risks such as power failures, excessive heat and tampering.

Evaluate the issues raised from the Carlson SAN mixing equipment from a number of vendors and determine the management options for dealing with this type of situation.

A SAN might bode well for your organization just provided that you have the right staff, plan, and business prerequisites to back it. Provided that your space necessities succumb to one of the accompanying situations, then a San may not be a good fit for you. You truly see the profits of a San when you have a group of servers to snare to the space system. A primary profit of utilizing a San originates from the unified administration of space possessions.

Despite the fact those organizations with handfuls or many servers profit from this concentrated administration, supervising only a couple of distinctive servers is simple enough to manage without establishing an exorbitant SAN. “You might increase speed and dependability profits from a San for only a couple of servers, yet provided that you can’t legitimize the expense of the San against the necessities of your requisitions, you ought not to introduce one” (Weill, & Aral, 2012). You have to weigh the expenses against the profits to see if a San venture bodes well for you. The gear that you have to purchase to make an adequate San might be pricey.

Justify the reduction of administration and management of storage networking through Carlson’s IP SAN.

The drumroll for IP storage area networks (SANs) has been long and loud, but end-user adopters have been few and far between. But that may be changing. Carlson Companies rolled out what may be the first data- center-class IP SAN at the company’s Minneapolis headquarters. On the IP SAN, Carlson currently has HP-UX servers and Solaris servers connected to a Hewlett-Packard XP512 disk array (which replaced the direct-attached EMC Symmetrix arrays). The HP-UX servers are equipped with Agilent’s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), and the Sun servers have Fibre Channel HBAs from JNI. Eventually, Carlson plans to add Windows NT servers to the IP SAN for applications such as Exchange and SQL Server Planning Storage Area Networks, Second Edition, concisely catches the key advances that are driving the space systems administration industry. Tom Clark’s meets expectations are serving to instruct the It group to the regale and tests of imparted space and are prescribed perusing for anybody wishing to comprehend this energizing new innovation.” Fibre Channel Sans have turned into a backbone at the backend of the grandest enterprises on the planet. The second version of Designing Storage Area Networks carries the following wave of association (IP) focuses and administration into setting, helping the client to rapidly comprehend all the profits before them.”

Space Area Networks (SANs) are currently distinguished as the favored answer for satisfying establishments’ and ventures’ basic information space needs. If controlled by Fibre Channel or TCP/IP and Gigabit Ethernet innovation, SANS far surpass the capacities of universal space access strategies. Sans are rapidly turning into the result of decision for associations that require high-volume information taking care of limit.

Assess how cloud computing could be used by Carlson instead of a SAN. Create a diagram using Visio or its open source alternative software to illustrate the use of cloud computing. Note: The graphically depicted solution is not included in the required page length.

More and more enterprises are turning to the cloud for services, solutions and transformation of services. Simply put, the cloud has become a viable alternative to traditional technologies for many enterprises, displacing existing technologies, and bringing new capabilities into business environments, with little fuss or muss. Purveyors of storage technologies are keeping a close eye on the cloud, wondering if cloud storage is poised to displace SAN and NAS technologies anytime in the near future. It is a valid threat after all, since cloud storage offers a whole host of advantages over traditional on-premise storage solutions. Nevertheless, SANs and NAS technologies do offer some advantages that the cloud may never be able to overcome – it all comes down to how storage is provisioned, used, protected and shared across an enterprise. Over time, cloud-based storage is becoming more palatable to enterprise administrators, although most see the technology as a supplement to traditional tier 1 storage products. That view will soften as companies turn more and more to cloud based applications and services.

Cloud computing in SAN is currently advancing like at no other time, with organizations of all shapes and sizes acclimating to this new innovation. Industry specialists accept that this pattern will just proceed to develop and improve considerably further in the nearing not many years .While cloud computing is undoubtedly valuable for fair size to huge organizations, it is not without its downsides, particularly for more modest organizations.

References

Moeller, R., (2010). IT Audit, Control, and Security. Hoboken, New Jersey. John Wiley and Sons

Infostor.com, (2002). Carlson’s data center relies on IP SAN. Retrieved from

http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/152933/articles/infostor/volume-6/issue-8/news-analysis-trends/carlsons-data-center-relies-on-ip-san.html

Muse.jhu.edu. Dispersal as a Resource. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dsp/summary/v013/13.2mung.html

Searchitchannel.techtarget.com. SNIA Shared Storage Model: Practical applications. Retrieved from http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/feature/SNIA-Shared-Storage-Model-Practical-applications

Place an Order

Plagiarism Free!

Scroll to Top