Storage Area Networks vs. Local RAID Arrays?

Noxx asks: "My department is purchasing several new servers for an intranet website project. We are under pressure to store our content on an existing Storage Area Network accessed over a fibre connection rather than on a local RAID-5 array, to cut purchasing costs on the new hardware. Have any Slashdot readers evaluated the pros and cons between the two storage technologies, and are there any points of concern we should address? How does performance compare between the two, and is this a proper use of the SAN? If multiple servers access the same content from the SAN, is the possibility of introducing a single point of failure (ie: the SAN crashes) a valid concern?"

Comments

SAN is probably better

[crow]

Generally, you will find that using a SAN is better. The sort of equipment that is deployed in a SAN is typically higher-end than what you would get with a stand-alone RAID array.

You probably also get a number of other advantages. Your SAN is probably already backed up. Your SAN is likely already part of any disaster recovery plan.

And while you could view the SAN as a single point of failure, you could also view your local RAID array as a single point of failure. Any decent SAN implementation has redundancy at every level.

Of course, I'm biased, as I work for EMC, a big SAN company.

You probably need to sit down with your IT people and discuss with them exactly how the SAN is set up. You'll probably find that it has more than enough reliability and performance for any web server application.