INTRODUCTION
Virtually every computer room, no matter how well organized has a series of servers for their moderate to less important applications that were configured with inexpensive internal storage. Over time, the accumulation of these servers presents system administrators with significant problems. The servers tend to be purchased from a variety of vendors and over time so the internal storage represents quite a wide assortment of disk capacities, management methods, age and reliability. Finally, the cost of managing and maintaining this “inexpensive” storage is now far higher than any savings originally achieved. The ultimate frustration is that there are always servers overflowing their storage capacity while others have substantial free space. What is needed is a simple, reliable, high capacity external storage pool that can easily be shared between several severs but without the very high cost of SAN and NAS solutions. That solution is a multi-ported disk array called “SAN-In-A-Box.”

HOW IT WORKS
Each SAN-In-A-Box provides a pool of storage capacity that can easily be partitioned and provisioned to multiple, independent servers of any type running any operating system. From this storage pool, the available storage capacity can be allocated as needed to any connected server. Each server can be provisioned with the required amount of storage in distinct logical units. Each logical unit is mounted by the resident operating system on the server and is recognized as an independent logical volume. The system administrator manages the allocation of the available storage capacity in the storage pool from any available computer on the network. Thus, all storage for all severs is managed using a single storage management platform, called FlashConsole, that also provides real-time monitoring of the storage pool and delivers e-mail alerts to specified e-mail addresses in the event of problems. The result is a more reliable, easier to manage storage environment with higher capacity utilization and superior storage monitoring and alerts.