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T.G.I. Friday's Owner Serves Up an IP SAN: Page 2 of 3

Carlson had a few small Fibre Channel SANs, and its T.G.I. Friday's restaurants are running network-attached storage devices for Oracle applications. Carlson's OS/390-based IBM mainframe and most of its Unix servers used direct-attached storage. The company spent $1.9 million on the SAN.

"This was pretty easy to sell because it's not just plumbing but has a real strategic value," says Steve Brown, Carlson's CIO. "It will better enable critical application development for our company."

Aside from the remote-backup applications, the SAN will handle storage for the company's new data warehouse application and PeopleSoft and Microsoft Exchange applications. Carlson also plans to use the SAN for its upcoming e-learning applications designed for training the company's restaurant and hotel employees.

The SAN handles about 11 TB of data today, and the company expects its disk space to grow about 35 percent per year. Storage performance has improved for at least one of Carlson's applications using the SAN: Oracle Financial reports run 55 percent faster than they did with direct-attached storage.

Carlson hopes to someday go without the Fibre Channel interfaces and Nishan SAN switches, opting for an all-IP storage infrastructure and IP SANs in multiple data centers. But that won't happen until IP storage standards like iSCSI become more widely available and mature.