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What’s left then, naysayer?
Well, I’ll tell you!
Storage Area Network – a SAN is a high-speed, scalable network of storage devices and servers, based on open architecture.
- SAN is high-speed – Unlike the bottlenecks one would expect on a user network (typically 10BaseT or 100BaseTX Ethernet), the SAN network is built upon SCSI Fibre Channel technology
- SAN is scalable – Most SANs will come with virtualization software which allows one to grow hard disk arrays into the petabytes. Disks, entire disk arrays, and tape libraries may be added to a SAN without the need to shift data around or shut down any services, as can additional servers
- SAN is open architecture – Since the SAN has been designed in an open fashion, no particular vendor monopolizes the market. As such, there is ferocious competition among vendors to provide SAN solutions, which benefits us in the end