Limited By Ports

[nickcherryjiggz]

I'm currently working on an exercise for a class whose focus is on network storage. The assignment's problem is clear to me, but don't know where to start as far as solutions. If someone could lead me in the right direction and perhaps suggest a technology that might be appropriate for the situation described below, I would be most appreciative...


The company’s current infrastructure consists of several storage arrays direct-attached to a heterogeneous mix of 90 servers. All servers are dual-attached to the arrays for reliability and redundancy.

Since each storage device has 32 connectivity ports, each could support a maximum of 16 servers. The company sees the 32-ports as a limitation. Each storage device has the disk capacity to support more than 16 servers. However, there was no way to add a 17th server to make use of that capacity and support future growth.


Primarily, I'm looking to restructure the environment in order to improve scalability of the system. Also enhancing performance and availability of the system would be ideal, but at the very least, these levels should be maintained.

Thanks again for any help!

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

some directions you can go with this :

for backend :
centralized storage which allows dynamic expansion of volumes,luns,... with redundancy of course ( clustered storage pair )
for frontend :
virtualize servers with ESX,with use of VMotion
As you will be virtualizing your hosts,you get redundancy of your hardware, as well as with the vmotion,and you save host attach ports as well.
rgds,

R.