Pioneer takes SAN plunge

West Hertfordshire College has become one of the first UK organisations to roll out a storage area network (SAN). Despite concerns over the technology's high costs and immaturity, the college installed a Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) SAN in its media school.

Ian Valkeith,the media school's network administrator, said: "The old system had a terrible bottleneck: students needed to use the same facilities at the same time because data storage was limited to individual machines."

The college's previous network had seven NT graphic workstations, three Pinnacle video editing machines with their own internal SCSI systems, and 18 PCs. Each editing machine had internal storage, so students could only access their work from one computer. The Pinnacles now have 100Mbps Ethernet connections to the desktops.

The SAN connects an FC-AL storage subsystem with 12 18Gb drives to the editing machines with a 12-port Gibraltar Fibre Channel (FC) managed hub from Gadzoox Networks.

FC-AL is a storage protocol based on Token Ring and FDDI. While this topology is not as scalable as switched FC, it is adequate for smaller data centres and, unlike switched Fibre Channel, there are commercial products.

Valkeith said: "We have massive amounts of space, and students can access data from any machine. The only teething problems were upgrading the Cue Logic fibre drivers on our Pinnacles to prevent crashes."

While multiple users have access to centrally held video files and can read the same data simultaneously, write control is limited to one user at a time.

The system was implemented by Sagitta Performance Systems. Valkeith said that because the technology is unproven, "storage integrators are hard to find, but I didn't feel that we were taking a risk because I was impressed by a working demo."

Jeremy Betancourt, senior analyst for Context, said: "SANs are just emerging but are already a mission-critical part of the network. Although the technology is of huge importance, it isn't very affordable at the moment. But SANs are the future of data management."