Certainly, the need for SANs is there. Companies involved in Internet commerce generate data at an explosive rate, and analyzation methods such as data mining make data valuable assets that demand a lot of capacity. The data deluge means regularly adding more storage via directly connected storage devices, plus the loss of network performance when data backup and recovery is done over the application network and some systems must be shut down. True interoperability would resolve the problem.

Storage area networks offer centrally managed pools of storage, consolidated logically or physically, that can be allocated among multiple servers and scaled up as needs require. Fibre Channel connections in a SAN allow greater distance between a server and a storage device--typically up to nearly four miles, and about 20 miles with extenders, compared with about 80 feet with SCSI, allowing the use of a SAN to connect several buildings across a business campus. Longer distances will require a wide area network technology such as asynchronous transfer mode.

Whether or not industry standards exist, some companies can't wait for them. The early adopters of SANs are taking advantage of the technology-- even if it's not fully available and they are, in effect, standardizing themselves by limiting storage devices to those available from a specific SAN solution vendor.

"When you look at the amount of storage that can reside behind the Fibre Channel infrastructure in a SAN, I think the cost is considerably less than a traditional SCSI implementation," says Cherry, the technical systems leader at Acxiom. "Now, I can manage a lot more storage from a central point. This gives me economies of scale in terms of my managed costs, as opposed to just physical cost."

Acxiom began deploying Compaq's StorageWorks SAN technology last fall. A SAN offers Acxiom the flexibility to reallocate 50 terabytes of storage as customer needs change. At Acxiom, with more than 200 Compaq, IBM, and Sun Microsystems servers running Windows NT and Unix situated in a single building, the storage isn't dedicated to specific servers. "Having a SAN in place would make storage available in an on-demand basis to handle peak loads and to handle special projects, such as data mining, for our customers, particularly in our outsourcing relationships," Cherry says.

To Mail.com, an E-mail provider for business clients and outsourced E-mail services for Internet service providers, the attraction of storage area networks is in centralizing storage management. In August, Mail.com implemented EMC's ESN system, connecting 100 Sun 450, 4000, and 6000 servers in a single building via Fibre Channel to 27 terabytes of centralized Symmetrix storage.

The primary application at Mail.com is E-mail, although billing functions also run on the servers. "At one point, we were managing data all over the network," Walden says. Since the SAN lets users consolidate storage either physically or logically, storage can be managed centrally and disks can be reconfigured on the fly, rather than reconfiguring disks in separate servers. A storage area network offers Mail.com higher data availability and requires fewer workers to manage it.

When implementing a new technology, Walden says, he felt comfortable choosing a relatively mature solution. "We're an Internet company, so maybe we're a little more ready to take risks, but I didn't feel like being on the bleeding edge," he says. "We felt confident that EMC could deliver a solution, so we took the leap."

Another Internet company, Elcom.com Inc., a hosted E-procurement service in Boston, implemented HP's SureStore XP256 enterprise storage product last fall. The device houses 1.5 terabytes of Elcom.com's data and will scale up to 18 terabytes. The advantage to Elcom.com is in data and server consolidation. "It allows us to have our data sitting on one box," CIO Danny Gurizzan says. "That's important to me. All the servers will go to one location, be they HP-UX, NT, or whatever, and reside there, allowing me to mine data, migrate data, and back up data." Elcom.com's servers are 40 feet from the storage device.

An HP shop, Elcom.com should reduce the number of its servers to 12 by the end of March, Gurizzan says. That would avoid an estimated $1 million in hardware and support costs during the next 12 months. In addition, the storage area network will require fewer workers to manage it and will occupy less space. "I'm going to be able to handle three or four times my current workload with just the 12 servers," he says. "It's expandable within the same footprint, and additional equipment can be installed without bringing the system down. Knowing we have a high-availability network with little chance of failure will increase our customers' comfort level."

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