The Ultimate Guide to Understanding Storage-Area Networking (SAN)

What is a Storage Area Network

A storage area network (SAN) is a network that allows you to store and retrieve data from various devices, such as computers, servers, and storage devices. A storage area network can be used to connect different server or computer systems together. It can also be used to connect a server with its own disk drive.

What are the Top Ten SANs for Your Business

The ten best SANs for your business are as follows:

1. The IBM DB2 SAN-HANA XIV (4TB) – This SAN offers incredible capacity for storing data and is one of the most popular San options for businesses.
2. Fujitsu NSX-10 blade servers – These servers offer great performance and are perfect for larger organizations looking to handle high volumes of data.
3. HPE ProLiant DL380e 6G Blade Center Storage arrays – These storage arrays offer excellent performance and can hold up to 8TB of data.
4. Dell EMC ARC4000 SAS 6G Storage area networks – This SAN provides extremely fast access to storage space with a greatly reduced feature set compared to other options on the market.
5. Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 Processor @ 2GHz rackmount server – This processor offers great performance for small businesses that need more than the standard offerings from Intel processors.
6. Dell PowerEdge S7000 12GB Cache Server – This server offers great performance for smaller organizations without spending a fortune on hardware alone.
7. Oracle Hadoop Cluster Diane 10GBASE-T Ethernet Switching Adapter – This adapter makes it easy to connect multiple Oracle nodes together using 10GBase-T networking technology.
8. Mellanox InfiniBand QSFP+ transceivers -These transceivers allow you to create high-speed networks between devices within an organization.
9. Tata Sanwa Semiconductor PLC 4000 series tape drives -This drive offers good value for money with its fast speed and wide range of features.
10. Microsoft Hyper-V SAN 2012 Standard Edition -This SAN allows you to create Windows 7 or Windows 8 applications on top of your existing VMware infrastructure.

Protocols of Storage-area network (SAN)

Following are the most common protocols of SAN (Storage Area Network):

1. FCP
2. iSCSI
3. FCoE
4. NVMe

• FCP: It is the most commonly used protocol of the Storage Area Network. It is a mapping of SCSI command over the Fibre Channel (FC) network.
• iSCSI: It stands for Internet SCSI or Internet Small Computer System Interface. It is the second-largest block or SAN protocol. It puts the SCSI commands inside an ethernet frame and then transports them over an Internet protocol (IP) ethernet.
• FCoE: FCoE stands for “Fibre Channel Over the Internet”. It is a protocol that is similar to the iSCSI. It puts the Fibre channel inside the ethernet datagram and then transports over an IP Ethernet network.
• NVMe: NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express. It is also a protocol of SAN, which access the flash storage by the PCI Express bus.

Benefits of storage area network(SAN)

A storage area network(SAN) is a form of network that uses multiple hard disks to store data. It is designed to support high performance and high scalability, allowing for increased storage density and greater throughput.

A SAN can be used as a backup storage system, providing the ability to recover from failure in the event of hardware or software failures. It can also be used as a shared storage system for multiple computers or servers, where each computer or server has its own copy of the data on the SAN.

SANs are often used in large-scale computing environments such as data centers, where there are many computers accessing shared resources. .

The main advantage of a SAN is its ability to provide reliable access to data across multiple computers and servers over long periods of time without requiring any dedicated backup services. A SAN is typically run on one of the network hardware components (such as a rack-mounted storage device or a strip-server box) that has more than 4 Gb/s of throughput. The data is centralized using the SAN to reduce latency and further reduce downtime, while also increasing reliability.

Difference between a storage area network (SAN) and Network attached storage (NAS)

Storage area networks (SANs) are a new technology that allows you to connect multiple storage devices such as hard disks, tape drives and solid state drives together.

Network-attached storage (NAS) is a technology that allows you to connect multiple storage devices such as hard disks, tape drives and solid state drives together.

These two technologies are often used interchangeably but they have some different applications. SANs can be used for high capacity storage but NAS can be used for low capacity storage. They both also have different benefits and drawbacks. Network-attached storage has the advantage of being able to use the same network infrastructure but NAS has the advantage of being able to use different network infrastructures depending on what type of data it stores. This is because NAS devices are connected directly to the network rather than to a network interface card to connect the network controllers. The downside of NAS is that it does have to be connected to a computer (in order for you to access and use it) but NAS is typically more inexpensive than other forms of storage.