SAN Explained

A Storage Area Network is a dedicated network, which typically consists of Storage Subsystems, Servers, Tape devices and interconnect devices such as Fibre Channel switches and FC-SCSI Bridges. While the transport layer for SAN can in theory be SCSI and Ethernet it is generally based on Fibre Channel technology as the dedicated bandwidth offered is ideally suited for rapidly transferring large amounts of data. S.A.N technology was developed to address 5 key areas that pose problems to the typical server based model.