Storage Requirement Forecasting Analysis Model for Storage Area Networks

Information management is an important area to concentrate for the business continuity of an organization. Organization should have a plan to store, retrieve and maintain its valuable information to meet the business demands. Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high performance network available to meet the enterprise storage solution. Since, SAN uses Fibre Channel (FC) as a transporting medium, it is considered to be fast, reliable and an optimum solution to handle the explosive growth of digital contents due to internet, application and use of modern gadgets. Various storage models are available for enterprise storage and choosing the relevant storage as per the business requirement needs careful analysis of the present and future storage consumption inside the organization. The SAN implementation in an organization involves many individual component analyses including storage requirement/capacity planning to handle the business information’s effectively and for the future. This research paper discusses a part of SAN implementation process, information generation, handling and information growth so that the SAN can be designed to meet the requirements. The aim of this paper is to analyze capacity of SAN as per the data generation and forecasting the data growth. The results were obtained for next five years in an organization using linear forecasting model to implement SAN as the enterprise storage solution. General Terms Enterprise Storage Design Analysis, Storage Area Networks Implementation, Storage Design Capacity Planning Analysis, Forecasting of Future Storage Usage.