file placement and SAN

Our sever admin just informed me that future server upgrade plans call for the use of a SAN. Other than knowing what the acronymn SAN stands for, this is totally unknown territory for me. Particulary in light of the current discussioni on placement of indexes vs. data tables (separate data/index) I'd like to ask if anyone has any knowledge/experience with SAN, and what I should be looking to do with it.

Our current standard configuration is an NT server with 'n' number of internally mounted disks of the size de jour. Two of the drives are paired into a mirror set (Raid-1) and the remainder are placed in a single stripe set (Raid-5).

The server admin carves an 8-gb partition (C:) drive out of the mirror set for the OS, and a 4-gb partition ( D:) from the stripe set for the Oracle software.

The remainder of the mirror set is put in a single partition (F:) with dedicated subdirectories for things like archive log files, backups, exports, redo.

The remainder of the mirror set is put in a single partition (E:) with dedicated subdirectories for control files, rollback, and tablespaces.

This entire arrangement is essentially the compromise we arrived at when we were first learning Oracle at 7.3 and our readings of the OFA publications available at that time -- primarily Loney's Oracle DBA Handbook, v7.3, and a white paper that translated that philosophy to a specifically NT environment.

I would like to take this opportunity to approach this SAN with fresh thinking, a 'green field' opportunity, rather than simply migrating current practice. My primary goals for new standards would be performance, followed (very, very closely) by flexibility and the ability to adjust and adapt.

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Ed Stevens
(Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)