Answers to any of these questions requires a basic understanding of how and why SAN technology developed in the first place. The accumulation of corporate data is accelerating at an extremely rapid rate. The incredible growth of data intensive applications and the Internet is fueling the demand for raw data storage. Data warehousing, online transaction processing, multimedia Internet and intranet browsing are doubling storage capacity on a biannual basis at Global 2000 companies, while e-commence companies are growing storage at rate of five to eight times a year. To help organizations deal with this explosive data growth, a new data center approach to managing and accessing storage is being adopted.
SANs are networked storage infrastructures designed to de-couple servers from storage systems.
The goal of de-coupling servers from storage systems is to have improvements in performance, reliability and scalability. De-coupling facilitates the independent scaling of CPU and storage capacity. SANs allow for storage consolidation by enabling multiple servers to connect to fewer, larger storage systems. This brings cost efficiencies that come from purchasing storage in larger units. Today, SAN development is being accomplished through Fibre Channel switched fabric technology.