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SANs are now within the price of just about any organisation, whereas a few years ago it was much cheaper to install systems in a standalone server environment with SAN’s being viewed as hyper-expensive protection for mission critical applications now the tables are turned.
Nearly all services in today’s IT system are considered by users to be mission critical, remember when you could take the firewall or the email system down for a day mid-week for repair? Not any more, this is where a SAN comes in.
NetWare and Linux are especially good technologies for use in a SAN environment with Novell Cluster services supporting up to 32 servers in a single cluster and the ability to have multiple clusters and operating systems running on a single SAN.
Once clustered applications have much greater protection from hardware failure as services automatically move between servers in the event of hardware failure and usually the users have no idea it as happened.
Hardware and software upgrades can now be done in-hours as services can be temporarily moved to run on other servers while you make your changes.
Nearly all Novell products can be clustered with notable exceptions being iChain and Security Manager (as they are single instance installations) and unlike some other popular operating systems there is nothing stopping you putting multiple Novell services into the same Active-Active cluster meaning maximum efficiency of hardware usage with no servers standing idle.
Imagine clustering all your file, print, GroupWise and ZENworks services onto a single SAN!
ST-FOUR can advise you on which products you may like to cluster and which cluster hardware would work best in your environment, including possible re-use of existing hardware investment!