Wednesday, 11 February 2015

SAN - Storage Area Network

Storage area network or SAN is a networking architecture that enables the connection of remote storage devices to servers so that operating systems can access these devices. A SAN is usually found in enterprise environments where it connects islands of data storage with the help of a high-speed network. SAN  help to increase and better utilize storage capacity as they connect multiple servers to several storage units. SANs are used to make available frequently used data that is connected to hard drives such as email servers, user information, and file servers that manage frequently used transactional data.

The SAN is made from plenty of fabric switches connected into a network. Users' computers are connected to the same network to access enterprise applications running on those servers. The more efficient method is to set up a SAN (Storage Area Network) and relocate all data into it. Since the SAN (Storage Area Network) is one giant storage box comprising many pieces of hard disks, it requires its own management system to handle its operations. No one server controls the SAN as its disks are allocated to all servers. Via a central console, the SAN administrator switches from disk to disk as though moving around all servers' storage disk. Take, for instance, a storage area network. "In computing, a Storage Area Network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer SAN, Network Attached Storage (NAS), uses file-based protocols such as NFS or SMB/CIFS definition. definition calls a storage area network an architecture. system. If that makes the Storage Area Network architecture work. Nowadays inter network communication between computers goes at a speed of Gbps. LAN stands for Local Area Network.

Nowadays all computer manufacturing companies dispatch computers with inbuilt network adapters which is the hardware platform upon which two computers communicate. SAN (Storage Area Network) recovery systems need advanced applications of software to configure, discover, monitor and plan several technologies and components, which develop the data recovery system. SAN recovery systems have many features. Storage networks are different from other types of network storage due to the low-level access type that they use. In storage networks, a server sends a request to data segments or specific blocks from particular disk drives. Most of the network storage devices make use of SCSI protocol to communicate between devices and servers.

Since SAN  do not carry any application traffic, they are a network between servers and storage devices; they do not create bottlenecks in the LAN. A fiber channel San network is made up of fiber channel switches. Network and channel protocols supported by SAN include SCSI, HIPPI, IP, ATM, etc.

Disaster recovery is made easy through SANs as storage replication can be implemented by disk array controllers and server software both. A storage device is machine typically made to contain disks to save data. The Storage Area Network (SAN), however, is a network segregated from the LANs and WANs. It is said to be a high velocity sub-network of connected storage devices. The storage area network is a device network connected to each other as well as to a server and it expected to turn into a great selection of technological device for data storage in the future. The device was originally made to curb the problems related to network attached storage (NAS) devices.

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