Both have significant implications for the future of networked storage. Before it became a corporate park, the land on which Almaden Research Center sits was home to a farm. The window from David Pease's office still looks out on a postcard-perfect green hillside kept neatly trimmed by grazing cows. These farms are a little more difficult to manage than a herd of cows because, unlike cows, which can understand one another, one server cannot understand data that has been created by another server. SANs promise to help provide a solution to that fundamental problem.
Software is needed to manage the flow of data among the servers and the storage devices.
That is about to change. One objective is high-performance data sharing across different platforms. Today, this requires either using a shared file server to store the transaction data, or having the NT server ask the UNIX server to send the file over the LAN so that the data can be processed locally on the NT server. Both introduce extraneous steps that impair performance. Another goal is to enable a company to balance the load across all its disk drives.