A SAN can be as bare-bones as a server connected via copper to a LAN having a dedicated backup connection, one industry analyst said. Another scoffed at that, saying direct-attached storage not only isn't a SAN, but it's a technology on a short path to extinction. For other analysts, it's not a SAN unless it runs on Fibre Channel and has fail-over and virtual storage capabilities. Forget the technology and start with the basic concept, said Stanley Worth, a product manager at Fibre Channel switch maker Crossroads Systems Inc. in Austin, Texas. A SAN is about time and space, he said.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Space is what keeps it all from happening in the same place. In other words, a SAN is the confluence of storage networking and data resources around space and time, he said. After hiring a systems integrator, investing months of work and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a SAN, he flipped the switch - and it failed. The SAN's Fibre Channel switches and Solaris servers just didn't work together, Tu said. Numerous interoperability glitches required custom fixes.