Anyone familiar with Storage Area Networks (SAN)?

[lokem]

Hi all,

As message title. I was reading about it the other day and it seems like a hot thing to implement nowadays. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it just seems like group of networked computers with tonnes of storage using RAID.

What do you guys think?


TIA

 

[SuperCheetah]

I don't really know too much about SAN's, but the concept sounds pretty neat. Anyway, here is what IBM has on their site about SAN's:

http://www.storage.ibm.com/ibmsan/san_basics.htm

A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated, centrally managed, secure information infrastructure, which enables any-to-any interconnection of servers and storage systems.
A SAN:

• Facilitates universal access and sharing of resources.

• Supports unpredictable, explosive information technology (IT) growth.

• Provides affordable 24 x 365 availability.

• Simplifies and centralizes resource management.

• Improves information protection and disaster tolerance.

• Enhances security and data integrity of new computing architectures

And from www.whatis.com

A storage area network (SAN) is a high-speed special-purpose network (or subnetwork) that interconnects different kinds of data storage devices with associated data servers on behalf of a larger network of users. Typically, a storage area network is part of the overall network of computing resources for an enterprise. A storage area network is usually clustered in close proximity to other computing resources such as IBM S/390 mainframes but may also extend to remote locations for backup and archival storage, using wide area network carrier technologies such as asynchronous transfer mode or Synchronous Optical Networks.
A storage area network can use existing communication technology such as IBM's optical fiber ESCON or it may use the newer Fibre Channel technology. Some SAN system integrators liken it to the common storage bus (flow of data) in a personal computer that is shared by different kinds of storage devices such as a hard disk or a CD-ROM player.

SANs support disk mirroring, backup and restore, archival and retrieval of archived data, data migration from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among different servers in a network. SANs can incorporate subnetworks with network-attached storage (NAS) systems.

 

[lokem]

Thanks for the info. Actually those were the articles that I read

I'm just wondering whether if anyone is using it in their company.

 

[tdeg]

I know a bunch of companies that use SANs... I help support some of them.

The term SAN is a pretty generic term. Think of it as a LAN designed not for network connectivity but for storage connectivity.

You can connect all different things to SAN; harddrives, tape, opticals, etc.