To design a SAN or any Storage solution, you need to be sure of your needs as well as your ability to assess the needs..

To do this correctly, you need to do the following (think of this as a checklist):

- Meet with everyone involved! From the people that decide where the business is headed to the people that have to work with and manage the actual data. This means getting the CXOs together with the DBAs and the Sys Admins.

- Ensure that all desision makers are educated and understand data storage from the bit level to the marketing hype.

- Plan, plan, plan. Once you understand how much data you actually have, and have a growth forecast, you can now start planning your real data storage needs.

- Data characteristics: You've gotten as far as getting everyone to talk and start planning. Now you need to assess what kind of data you actually have. High transaction databases, medium volume email, some light file sharing, or more likely a combination of all of these.

- Focusing on a storage strategy: You've now catagorized your storage needs based on data types, growth, business plans as well as budgeting. Now we can really hone in and decide what storage type is a best fit.

We can assist in every step of this process.