For providers of web-based services, it is the best of times and the worst of
times. The best of times because customers are spending more than ever on
services. The worst of times because with traditional architectures, no matter
how much capacity sites allocate, end user demand outstrips the horsepower
and storage capacity of the server plant.
The most important problem faced by Web infrastructure designers is how to
provision the systems to cope with the incredibly rapid growth in number of users
and storage capacity.
Storage Area Networks (SANs), based on Fibre Channel switched fabrics,
provide a powerful framework for building and managing server plant that is
flexible, cost-effective and future-proof.
In this paper, we analyze several scaling problems and show how SAN
technology can address these issues, allowing the administrator to create Web
infrastructure with unprecedented management, flexibility, performance and
scaling characteristics.
