Storage-Area Network

• One drawback of network-attached storage systems is that the storage I/O operations consume bandwidth on the data network, thereby increasing the latency of network communication.
• A storage-area network (SAN) is a private network (using storage protocols rather than networking protocols) connecting servers and storage units, as shown in Fig. 7.

  Figure 7: Storage-area network.

  
• The power of a SAN lies in its flexibility. Multiple hosts and multiple storage arrays can attach to the same SAN, and storage can be dynamically allocated to hosts.
• A SAN switch allows or prohibits access between the hosts and the storage. As one example, if a host is running low on disk space, the SAN can be configured to allocate more storage to that host.
• SANs typically have more ports, and less expensive ports, than storage arrays.
• FC is the most common SAN interconnect. An emerging alternative is a special-purpose bus architecture named InfiniBand, which provides hardware and software support for high-speed interconnection networks for servers and storage units.