Survey: SAN Extension on the Rise

SAN extension, largely left for dead several years ago, shows signs of renewed growth.

According to the "2007 Enterprise User Survey on Storage Area Networks & Storage Transport Services," published this week by Heavy Reading, 136 enterprise IT managers worldwide report growing interest in SAN extension and other storage transport services (STS).

While just 16 percent of those polled are using SAN extension services now, 60 percent plan to add them within the next two years, mostly through the use of Fibre Channel over IP.

Just 21 percent of respondents reported having no plans for SAN extension, in contrast with a similar survey in 2004, in which Heavy Reading found 40 percent of 260 respondents expressing no interest.

Service providers once banked on the growth of SAN extension services over Sonet, optical wavelengths, private networks, and Ethernet connections. But deployment fell short of expectations, despite growth in online backup, hosted email, and other kinds of storage-related services. (See Iron Mountain Makes Email Move, Exchange Issues Spawn Services, On Demand In Demand, and Stretching SANs.)But growth in the SAN population is moving ITers to consider services to link them geographically. "STS enables enterprises to extend and connect their SANs without having to build their own transport infrastructure," says James Crawshaw, analyst at large for Heavy Reading and author of the report.

That's an attractive option in a world where SANs are multiplying. While 79 percent of respondents have at least one SAN site, 58 percent are planning to add at least one to five more within the next two years, the report states.

Backup and synchronous replication/mirroring were cited by 71 percent and 69 percent of respondents, respectively, as the chief applications for STS and SAN extension.

There have been rumblings that SAN extension is gaining ground, particularly in light of support for faster IP networks supporting iSCSI SANs. (See The iSCSI Subtext to 10-GigE.) This survey hints that IT pros are indeed considering service options as they expand their reliance on SANs.

You may get more details and/or purchase the report here.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch