Statistical Concepts, Methods and IT Applications

Storage Area Network (SAN)

To manage a national statistical information system of quality and integrity, DOS collects, processes and maintains a progressive nerve centre of leading indicators and comprehensive economic, business, demographic and social statistics using state-of-the-art technology. In managing the exponential information growth at DOS, there is a radical and long-term plan to establish a robust and expandable storage architecture to support a wide range of application systems and specific-purpose statistical projects.

Storage Area Network (SAN) provides a high-speed, high-bandwidth storage network that logically connects storage to servers, so that enterprise information can be accessed from the consolidated storage platform at any time. Its scalability for increased storage of data and systems can be managed independently and effectively without having the need to change or upgrade the servers. By exploiting SAN, DOS is able to obtain high performance in storage I/O processes that are required for intensive applications’ and databases’ processing.

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The SAN infrastructure has been assessed to be best suited for DOS in terms of the scalability, more efficient storage utilization and management, easier data sharing, fault tolerant and redundancy features leading to reduced disk failure and long-term cost-effectiveness. DOS uses the HP SAN XP512 storage system with 2 Terabytes raw capacity, scalable up to 37 Terabytes raw capacity. SAN lays the foundation for the delivery of DOS' strategic rightsizing of mainframe applications' project. It also supports the future upgrade and consolidation of other statistical systems on the Unix and NT platforms to provide greater reliability for DOS’ business critical applications.

DOS is one of the few early adopters of SAN. The DOS’ SAN which will be fully implemented by May 2002, would be one of the large SAN infrastructures among the government agencies. The set-up is at the Government Data Centre where DOS’ new client/server platform rides on the HP Unix, SUN Solaris and Windows 2000 operating systems. At the same time, DOS is able to fully utilize the SAN to share its centralized backup resources for its various applications needs, increase and optimize the SAN resources to support new demands, disaster recovery and clustering needs in the future.

 

Source : Statistics Singapore Newsletter, March 2002

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