What is a Storage Area Network (SAN)?

What does SAN stand for?

A garage area Network (SAN) is a sTable excessive-Velocity inFormation Switch commUnity that gives get admission to to consolidated Block-stage garage. An SAN Makes a commuNity of Storage Devices available to multiple Servers. SAN gadgets seem to servers as attached drives, removing traditional Network Bottlenecks.

SANs are on occasion additionally mentioned (albeit redundantly) as SAN Storage, SAN network, community SAN, etc.

What Does Storage Area Network Mean?

Introduced inside the early 2000s, SANs had been to begin with Constrained to agency Class Computing. Today, excessive-speed disk fees have regularly dropped and SANs have eMerge as a mainstay for more organizational storage.

SAN Implementation simplifies information life cycle control and plays a essential role in turning in a regular and secure statistics transfer infrastructure.

SAN solutions are to be had as two sorts:

• Fiber Channel (FC): Storage and servers are connected thru a excessive-speed community of Interconnected fiber channel switches. This is used for undertaking-essential applications wherein unInterrupted statistics get admission to is required.
• Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) Protocol: This infrastructure gives the ability of a low-value IP Network.

Both provide benefits based totally on commercial enterprise necessities.

The benefits of SAN encompass:

• Storage Virtualization: Server ability is not related to unmarried storage gadgets, as big and consolidated garage pools at the moment are available for Software Packages.
• High-Speed Disk Technologies: An Instance is FC, which gives Records retrieval speeds that exceed 5 Gbps. Storage-to-garage records switch is likewise to be had thru direct facts transmission from the source to the goal Device with minimal or no server intervention.
• Centralized Backup: Servers View stored information on neighborhood disks, in preference to a couple of disk and server connections. Advanced backup capabilities, which includes bLock level and Incremental Backups, streamline IT machine administrator obligations.
• Dynamic Failover Protection: Provides non-stop community operation, even though a server Fails or goes Offline for renovation, which enables built-in redundancy and automatic visitors reRouting.

SAN is offered by using server producers, including IBM and HP. Server-impartial SAN companies consist of EMC and Network Appliance.