Why SAN’s are a fast emerging requirement for Enterprise and Workgroup storage needs.

All recognize the massive increase in data storage requirements that has taken place over the past two years. This has been fuelled primarily by the proliferation of graphics based applications, the leading areas have been Internet/Intranet usage, Data warehousing and Video/Imaging.

In addition to the applications impacting the amount of data stored, advance technologies have enabled a whole new way of looking at data. For example the dramatic increase in implementing high performance clustering and the need for multi-user editing systems to share data.

Recognising data as a key strategic resource is also making IT managers take a fresh look at how the data in their organisations is being accessed and managed. It is now realised how valuable all this data is. That being the case protecting data and sharing it among the whole company is taking centre stage in IT managers minds.

The convergence of available new technologies and the explosion of the amount of data stored has fortuitously happened at a time when we have the affordable solutions available to handle the need.

SAN’s are that affordable solution

The Anatomy of a SAN

Fibre Channel Technology
The industry accepted underlying enabling technology for SAN’s is Fibre Channel (FC). FC is an ANSI approved standard which is now widely adapted by all the leading computer and peripheral manufacturers.

Fibre Channel as a technology provides for copper and Fiber Optic interconnects. It can carry simultaneously multiple protocols. The most popular today being IP and SCSI. Many manufacturers have designed devices around this standard. FC supports three different topologies which can all be intermixed in a FC Fabric, they are Point to Point, Switched and Arbitrated Loop. The topology of a SAN can be a mixture of these. FC supports 100Mbytes/sec bandwidth per loop, with dual loops 200 Mbytes/second. The figure below shows a typical SAN set-up.