What do storage professionals really need to know about MAN & WAN transport technologies?
The good news is that storage professionals do not need a strong background in networking technology. The most important skill is being able to communicate application bandwidth and performance requirements in a form that your network IT group or service provider can understand. This is my focus for my “MAN/WAN Storage Networking” SNIA tutorial. Many storage professionals believe they can’t afford data center to data center networking because they over-estimate the amount of bandwidth they really need. Fibre Channel, FICON and Ethernet ports now run well over 1Gbps, however the disk mirroring applications driving data across the MAN & WAN only require a small fraction of the bandwidth provided by the port. Any storage professional can estimate their required bandwidth just by dividing a day’s worth of incremental data by the time the data’s changing. For example, a 10 Terabyte disk that is mirrored over a 10 hour period with a 5% daily change rate only requires 112Mbps of bandwidth, we
