Vixel is a major industry player that just went public in September. Weaknesses of SANs For all their potential, SANs are not without their problems. According to John William Toigo's The Holy Grail of Storage Management , IT professionals must have extensive knowledge to manage SANs properly as SANs encompass both storage and networking technologies. This combination of network and storage technology makes SANs more difficult to manage than traditional storage systems. Normally, network managers do not purchase SANs.
System administrators buy SANs, and they usually know little about LANs.
Another weakness of SANs is that they are completely dependant on fibre channel. Fibre channel is largely a niche technology that is very expensive to integrate into a company's larger network, which is usually Ethernet-based. Summary SANs are currently the best performing storage architecture - which makes them attractive to IT managers. The SAN architecture also looks to be well represented in the stock market with such high flying SAN stocks as Brocade, Emulex, and Gadzoox. However, investors may want to consider that SANs represent only a temporary solution for storage issues.