As it turns out, there's a huge demand for better, more intelligent management of organizations' data: whether to more optimally store it, more dynamically redeploy it, do more with it, better secure it, lower the cost per gigabyte or the required energy to support it. Running these data management applications 'on the fabric' turns out to be more effective, efficient and cheaper. Specifically:
- Broad OS Support -- Storage fabrics aren't tied to server operating systems, so they can easily work across heterogeneous server environments.
- Heterogeneous Storage Support -- Similarly, fabric apps work across vendors' arrays. This comes in very handy for lease expirations or any time you need to move between different vendors' storage equipment.
- Eliminating Host Footprint -- Fabric apps don't require server agents - this is a huge area of savings for large enterprises who would otherwise have to touch hundreds or thousands of servers, not just for the deployment, but every patch, upgrade, etc.
- Leverage for your SAN Infrastructure -- most companies have a SAN, and this is a way to leverage your current investment rather than deploy additional servers or appliances to support a new application. You also leverage your existing staff's expertise in SAN administration.
- Enterprise Scalability -- Fabric apps are designed to scale with the SAN - to thousands of hosts and Storage Arrays.
- Highest Performance -- Fabric apps run on purpose-built hardware rather than generic x86 boxes. This means that applications execute at wire-speed, on devices capable of millions of IOPS.
- Enterprise Reliability -- Fabric apps are using the same trusted data backbone that deliver 99.999% reliability in the data-path day in and day out.
Today there are a growing number of applications finding their way onto storage fabrics. An upcoming topic will be about some of these types of Fabric apps.
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