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QUESTION
Read the case study titled, "Carlson Companies" found at the end of Chapter 12 and also linked here as a PDF.
Write a fully developed paper in which you:
Assess how the Carlson SAN approach would be implemented in today’s environment.
Compare the pros and cons of consolidating data on a SAN central data facility versus the dispersed arrangement it replaces.
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.
Justify the reduction of administration and management of storage networking through Carlson’s IP SAN.
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.
Use at least three quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar websites do not qualify as quality resources.
Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:
| Subject | Technology | Pages | 5 | Style | APA |
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Answer
Storage Area Network
How Carlson’s approach would be implemented in today’s environment
Carlson wishes to solve its set objectives by building a centralized and consolidated storage area network (SAN). SAN is basically a network of devices used for storage and connects a number of servers within a given a network and any other available device (Lam, Lam, Tam, & Zhu, 2018). To implement SAN, a huge number of RAMs for RAM caching, ECC motherboards which will be compatible with the RAMs, cases to hold the large number of disks, two 8 TB hard drive along with RAID card to improve the performance and use of ECC memory would all be needed. Reliability and performance of the SAN is implemented using RAID technology which also offers back up storage of data between different disks (Tucek, Anderson & Wylie, 2015). Carlson can implement a data warehouse by obtaining the data from the centralized database to be created and mainframe. Since the mainframe supports a number application, it is a major source of data. Creating of this data warehouse will make use of ETL tools such as panoly, flydata and funnel, SaaS cloud computing storage, and data visualization tools such as chartio, domo and klipfolio. SAN and RAID technologies can ensure reliability and scalability of the database.
Pros and cons of consolidating data on a SAN central data facility versus the dispersed arrangement it replaces.
Advantages of using storage are Network in Carlson include:
- The development of SAN makes use of RAID technology for storage of data. The use of RAID ensures that data is protected using a powerful algorithm which will ensures that that data remain consistent.
- SAN is highly flexible and able to cope up with the changing technology and cater for the increasing demands.
- SAN offers better utilization of storage media. Central locating of the storage ensures reduced number of disks are used and access of servers is done only to those servers that requests for it and cost of disks is reduced due to the centralization.
- SAN ensures faster and more secure disaster recovery mechanism or solution
- SAN ensures better management and utilization of an organization’s storage resources such as servers.
Disadvantages of using storage area network in Carlson include:
- Traffic along the network lines will cause the operations such as request response to be extremely slow.
- The initial cost of setting up a storage area network is quite high in terms of purchasing the needed the hardware and software that will be used during the set up process of SAN, hardware such as ECC memory and motherboard compatible are expensive and rare to get.
The issues raised from the Carlson SAN mixing equipment from a number of vendors and the management options for dealing with the situations.
Carlson taking up a multi-vendor approach will raise a number of operational issues that will be dealt with through a number of ways. In order to cater for these issue Carlson will have address the issue of network management by ensuring that the number of network tools are provided to cater for network connections and requirement, need for skills staff will require professions skilled with the management of the equipment or training of the employee to take place, by using multi-vendor system there is need for a vendor system that will allow for interoperability between the different solutions offered by the different vendors and lastly we have escalation support
Justification of the reduction of administration and management of storage networking through Carlson’s IP SAN.
Carlson SAN has taken advantage of the well understood and existing IP networking technologies in order to reduce the management and administration of networking storage. Furthermore, central storage and placing of data storage over IP has ensured that Carlson will have a secure and more efficient storage services. The back-end of Carlson consists of the edge and the core storage locations that ensures high data transfer speeds between the storage devices and its host. Availability and integrity of data is ensured due to the use of fiber channel mechanism that SAN uses. Fabric shortest path first protocol is used for Fibre channels in order to ensure best path are selected to cover paths between hosts and storage devices (Sultan, Jamieson & Simpson, 2010). The core layer found in the SAN model provides fast speed connection between the switches and the core to ensure maximum throughput.
How cloud computing could be used by Carlson instead of a SAN
With the increase in the number of organizations starting to use cloud services, more and more capabilities have been possible in the business industries and reduction in the use of traditional technologies. Most people, businesses and organizations are trying to test if it is advantageous to replace SAN or even NAS with cloud storage. Cloud computing could be used to store data and information about the daily transaction of the Carlson and can be retrieved at any time anywhere over the internet, furthermore, cloud computing can be used in order to share information between a business and its customer in order to promote transparency (Rittinghouse & Ransome,2016), managers can use tools provided by cloud services in order to manage the company finances instead of managing it within the Mainframe area and with the use of cloud computing mobile technology can be promoted by enabling portability in storage and access of information via mobile phone.
Figure 1 how cloud computing works and some of its services
Source (Author, 2019)
References
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Lam, W. K., Lam, W. T., Tam, Y., & Zhu, L. (2018). U.S. Patent Application No. 10/152,281. Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press. Sultan, N. T., Jamieson, D. D., & Simpson, V. A. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,831,733. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Tucek, J. A., Anderson, E. A., & Wylie, J. J. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,009,524. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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