Best Practices In SAN Migration

Not too long ago, storage administrators were managing the growth of their Storage Area Networks (SANs) on the fly – probably not the degree of management they would have liked, but they were nevertheless getting the job done. However, with the exponential growth of data over the last five to seven years, this task has started to become overwhelming, to say the least. And with the additional stress of data retention due to federal regulations, the ability to grow and manage at the same time has become crucial – not only to keeping your job, but also to becoming a valuable player in the organization.

This growth has led many datacenter managers to a position of migrating from old, legacy equipment to newer, more robust and scalable equipment. When the older Fibre Channel switches just can't scale any further, it may be that the older design and architecture the environment is based on is simply unable to keep pace with the data rates in demand today. Hence the reason for migrating from smaller, less scalable legacy switches and SANs to state-of-the-art, scalable and robust switches and SAN designs.

The purpose of this paper is to give the Storage Administrator or Storage Architect a general purpose, "best practices" guideline to help him/her through a migration from one Storage Area Network to another in the least intrusive manner.

This paper will contain the information needed to document assessment results, blank forms for recording these results, procedures and suggestions to help implement a migration. The idea is to give the user a base to start from and to invoke the thought process when taking on such a challenge, though not to provide a step-by-step procedure that answers all questions. There are too many aspects and considerations that are involved in this type of project, as well as various configurations/environments, to assume that one procedure fits all. Instead, the intent here is to provide an informative, general purpose document to make the user's experience less frustrating.