Understanding the data requirements of the storage system is necessary for a successful deployment. Increasingly, SANs are being deployed so that the storage is independent of the servers used in conjunction with it. Deploying SANs can represent a decrease in the time to recover from a non-functional server as the machine can be replaced without having to relocate the storage drives.
Use these questions to evaluate if your deployment storage requirements would be best served through a SAN:
Are reads or writes more prevalent?
Do you need high I/O rate storage? Is striping the best option?
Do you need high uptime? Is mirroring the best option?
How is the data to be backed up? When is it going to be backed up?