How do you assess the risks and impacts of a SAN failure on your business continuity?

A storage area network (SAN) is a network of storage devices that provides high-performance, centralized, and scalable data storage for servers and applications. A SAN failure can have serious consequences for your business continuity, as it can disrupt your access to critical data, affect your performance and availability, and compromise your security and compliance. Therefore, it is essential to assess the risks and impacts of a SAN failure and plan accordingly for disaster recovery. In this article, we will cover some key steps and factors to consider when conducting a SAN risk assessment.

1 Identify your SAN assets and dependencies

The first step is to identify your SAN assets, such as the storage devices, switches, controllers, cables, and software that make up your SAN infrastructure. You also need to identify the servers, applications, and users that depend on your SAN for data access and storage. This will help you determine the scope and scale of your SAN failure scenario and the potential business impact.

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Art Braune

Senior Solutions Architect - Storage
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Everything other than chassis failure should be accounted for in a solid design that involves a SAN; this should include redundant fabric switches, mesh networking, high-availability SAN controllers and power supplies. Also key, is current maintenance/support for all of these elements.

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Arnab Karmakar

VCF Support Account Manager
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Redundant fabrics, HA storage controllers, spare ready disks, maintaining above 20% free space in your storage pool, these are the technical aspects and from management point of view, it is very important to keep track of your assets. Note the the data center location, the chassis and rack numbers, smooth process to have quick access to the datacenter and very importantly cable tagging. The last point I mentioned -- Cable tagging, is something that is sometimes overlooked and at the moment an incident strikes where hands and feet support are needed, identifying the correct cables can save time.

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Zoltán Balogh

Storage engineer, Windows specialist
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You should eliminate the single point of failures form you SAN design at the time of planing. And plan / design everything with redundancy and spare capacity. Try to avoid mixing different tech versions and SW versions in your SAN Fabric and Storage Devices. Depens on the budget a complete DC site loss can be survived without outage... Same goes for RTO and PTO for backup / DR.

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2 Analyze your SAN failure modes and causes

The next step is to analyze the possible failure modes and causes of your SAN. For example, you may face hardware failures, software bugs, configuration errors, human errors, power outages, network issues, cyberattacks, or natural disasters that can affect your SAN performance or availability. You need to evaluate the likelihood and severity of each failure mode and cause, and how they can propagate through your SAN components and dependencies.

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Doug Scott
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One thing I've learned the hard way is that the failure mode that has the largest impact is typically the one you didn't consider. I've experienced two complete SAN failures, neither one of them the failure of the device, firmware, networking, or really anything IT specific. Both failures were building environmental incidents that shutdown our primary production SAN environments in the middle of the workday. We (IT) had not considered or practiced for an environmental failure, just and IT failure. I'd recommend you add a scenario called generic facility failure be prepared to start from zero.

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3 Evaluate your SAN failure impacts and consequences

The third step is to evaluate the impacts and consequences of your SAN failure on your business continuity. You need to consider the effects of data loss, data corruption, data breach, data unavailability, or data degradation on your business processes, functions, objectives, and outcomes. You also need to consider the legal, regulatory, contractual, and reputational implications of your SAN failure. You need to quantify the costs and losses associated with each impact and consequence, and prioritize them according to your business needs and requirements.

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4 Define your SAN failure mitigation and recovery strategies

The fourth step is to define your SAN failure mitigation and recovery strategies. You need to identify the actions and resources needed to prevent, detect, respond, and recover from your SAN failure. You also need to establish the roles and responsibilities, communication channels, escalation procedures, and backup plans for your SAN failure management. You need to align your SAN failure mitigation and recovery strategies with your business continuity plan and objectives.

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Richard K.

Senior Storage Engineer/Architect
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The very first thing to note is that a single dual fabric setup is not business continuity. BC requires a minimum of two geographically disparate locations.

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5 Test and validate your SAN failure plan

The fifth step is to test and validate your SAN failure plan. You need to conduct regular tests and drills to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of your SAN failure mitigation and recovery strategies. You also need to monitor and measure the performance and availability of your SAN infrastructure and data. You need to review and update your SAN failure plan based on the test results, feedback, lessons learned, and changing business needs and requirements.

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6 Document and communicate your SAN failure plan

The final step is to document and communicate your SAN failure plan. You need to create a comprehensive and clear document that outlines your SAN failure scenario, risk assessment, impact analysis, mitigation and recovery strategies, roles and responsibilities, communication plan, backup plan, and test plan. You also need to communicate your SAN failure plan to all the relevant stakeholders, such as your SAN team, IT team, business team, management team, vendors, partners, customers, and regulators. You need to ensure that everyone is aware of and prepared for your SAN failure plan and expectations.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Arnab Karmakar

VCF Support Account Manager
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In current times, where cloud as emerged as go to technology for easy access to infrastructure, I feel having a hybrid solution is something worth planning for. I recently completed my certification on Vmware on cloud and I have to say, having a DR solution where you can re-create and have your infra up and running in 30mins in event of a disaster was something unimaginable a few years ago.

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How do you assess the risks and impacts of a SAN failure on your business continuity?

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1 Identify your SAN assets and dependencies

2 Analyze your SAN failure modes and causes

3 Evaluate your SAN failure impacts and consequences

4 Define your SAN failure mitigation and recovery strategies

5 Test and validate your SAN failure plan

6 Document and communicate your SAN failure plan

7 Here’s what else to consider

Storage Area Network (SAN)

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