It also created homogeneous SANs that tended to keep the cost of SANs high. We shall refer to this phase as the legacy proprietary fabric switch phase. Switches that are standards based provide heterogeneous capability that will reduce not just the management costs of running a SAN, but also lower the price of the components. Clearly the SANs of the future run on Open 2Gb Fabric. Figure 1 - Storage Area Networks have evolved in three distinct generations.
Users can determine the topology of the net, for example, or find redundant links for fail-over use.
A group of drives might be visible only to Solaris servers, for instance, while NT servers see only another group of drives. This requirement makes the 2 Gb speed especially important for maximizing throughput on the interswitch link and avoiding proprietary trunking schemes. The SANmark program is designed to ensure conformance to common network operations that promote robust, heterogeneous Fibre Channel networks. Specifically, Fibre Channel furnishes network features such as protocol multiplexing, as well as traditional channel features for simplicity, repeatable performance, and guaranteed delivery. The 2 Gb products will continue to use all of the existing Fibre Channel protocols to allow a seamless migration.