IP-centric SAN the way to go for travel company

Computerworld - Travel industry conglomerate Carlson Companies Inc. needed a way to share corporate data with remote offices in more than 140 countries and to manage data backups for those operations. A storage-area network (SAN) with IP technology at its core offered better data-routing capabilities and ease of use than Fibre Channel-only approaches, according to IT managers at Minneapolis-based Carlson.
Gary Johnson, an architectural consultant at the company's Carlson Shared Services IT division, said the Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) technology that Carlson is using wraps Fibre Channel data into IP packets for transmission across an Ethernet network. Networking devices can read information inside the packets in order to follow sophisticated routing instructions, he added.
That's more convenient and flexible than so-called tunneling techniques that link separate Fibre Channel SANs, Johnson said. "Rather than building a tunnel between two SANs, I've got data packets running over a network, and if one route goes down, I can just reroute it," he said.
Using IP along with Gigabit Ethernet routers at the center of the storage network lets Carlson "treat the SAN as if they were managing and operating a LAN," said Randy Fardal, vice president of marketing at Nishan Systems Inc. in San Jose. As part of the SAN installation, Carlson installed 12 of Nishan's storage switches to convert data back and forth between Fibre Channel and IP.
Carlson CIO Steve Brown said the SAN will help build a foundation for new applications, such as a companywide data warehouse that's being developed to support information-sharing among Carlson's business units and with customers and suppliers.
"We wanted to make sure we had the infrastructure in place as we started creating these capabilities and applications," Brown said, adding that Carlson also plans customer relationship management and strategic sourcing initiatives.
Brown said that if he had the SAN project to do over again, he would have done more benchmarking tests to ensure that network bandwidth would be sufficient. "I think we did a pretty good job managing that, but it would really have been nice to stress the architecture we were looking at a little more than we did," he said.
Security issues related to sending data over an IP network weren't a great concern for Brown. "I asked one of my technical guys . . . and we just don't see any [problems] at this point," he said.

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