A. N. Uwaechia, O. Akinsanmi
As the demand for the consolidation of data stores continues to escalate, a new approach, capable of delivering high bandwidth through multiple and heterogeneous server platforms to a common storage repository at reduced cost, is beginning to emerge. Storage Area Networking (SAN) is an open storage architecture designed to eliminate many of the traditional bottleneck associated with secondary and tertiary storage devices. Calculating the improvement on reliability by using the Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) system associated with 90 data disks divided into 6 groups with each having 15 disks. For this scenario 10 hours (ð?´ð?»ð?»ð?¹ð?«ð??ð??ð??) was considered. The results for the ð?´ð?»ð?»ð?ð?¹ð?¨ð?°ð?« system was achieved to be ð?. ð??ð?? ð??ð?ð??ð?? hours = ð?ð??, ð??ð??ð??. ð?? yrs while for a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) having a ð?´ð?»ð?»ð? parameter of ð?. ð?? ð?? ð?ð??ð?? hours (for a typical Fibre channel single disk drive), gives an MTTF value of 16,666.7 hours, or 1.9 yrs. It is now clear that the RAID technology used in the SAN design has a high increase in reliability over the JBOD with over 16 thousand years and has established itself to be of choice in storage repository.