Is it an End of Era for FC SAN?

In recent changes that have happened in the storage industry, it makes me believe that we are nearing an era which may be the end of SAN. If we look back & contemplate the way SANs were designed they were meant to solve just one of the many problems that are till today the unsolved problems. The SAN was originally meant to replace the locally attached storage, which to some extent has been successfully achieved.

The era of FC SAN was in full flow until advent of Gigabit & then 10 Gigabit Ethernet came into existence in around late 2010 decade. The NAS that existed even before SAN came into existence and continued to remain in the foray, but their age-old file system protocols were not enough to address the complexities of the mission-critical enterprise applications that require complex filesystem functionalities & security that were further made available by the advancing Linux technologies & the file systems designed on run on them, such as the LFS, ZFS, JFS, DFS, NTFS, JFFS, HPFS, HDFS, etc.

These required users to move to SAN to get access to centralized RAW volumes that can be mounted on the mission-critical application servers to make use of the newer filesystem. Things changed for SAN manufacturers as the Hard Disk density kept increasing & the cost of manufacturing kept falling. Today disk made for desktops are having size of >2TB with comparable performances to match that of the SAN based disks. So, the fundamental problem of requirement of RAW disk space kept diminishing over time, while users still continued using the centralized SAN.

The Ethernet technology advanced to make use of NIC bonding & eventually today has 40GB trunk speed to carry traffic meant for datacenters & cloud computing applications. This can be leveraged by the iSCSI SAN solution providers as well as the age old NAS solution providers to offer greater bandwidth for the hosts and their underlying applications. The NAS vendors aren’t left behind either. High performance file system protocols came into existence in the form of NFS V4 & SMB (CIFS) V3 that offered high throughput as well as addressed all the concerns that existed in the age old NAS filers.

The typical legacy block based RAID got replaced with file & object based RAID that offers much more flexibility & availability of data in the event of failures on the underlying Hard Disk system. Today’s NAS has ability to fine tune itself with whatever storage is placed in its backend. This only made NAS appliances more robust as they can offer not only file systems over the network but also the block based storage such as iSCSI as a unified all-in-one solution.

Software defined storage is further changing the paradigm for end-users and data-centers. It allows users to pick-up the hardware of their choice & with any backend storage, be it SATA, SAS or SSD or a low profile small form factor Flash Cards that can even be accommodated in the 2U form factor hardware and build their own NAS systems thus removing the vendor locking for costlier hardware.

All this only leads us to believe, is it end of era for FC SAN?

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Contributed by: Taizun Kanchwala | Calsoft Inc.