lost+found

Why SANs?

W. Curtis Preston

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Storage area networks are just the latest fad. I wouldn't bother learning about them, and I certainly wouldn't try to be an early adopter of SAN technology. That is, as long as you don't mind missing out on the biggest paradigm shift since the advent of the LAN. I predict that in just a few years, SANs will be as ubiquitous as LANs. Just as you assume today that any server that needs access to other computing resources needs to be put on a LAN, you will assume that any server that needs access to storage resources will need to be connected to the SAN. Large disk arrays and tape libraries will become commonplace, and anyone connecting to the SAN will be able to share these resources. I believe that this paradigm shift will create storage possibilities that we haven't yet imagined, just as the invention of LAN/WAN technologies eventually gave birth to what we now know as the Internet.

Although the above statements may sound a little optimistic, I hope I've piqued your interest in SANs just a little bit. In this first installment of a multi-part series of articles on SANs, I will examine how we got here - what kind of trouble we've gotten ourselves into by allowing the storage size of the average server to grow exponentially.