What's In A SAN?

• A SAN is a network, much like the Internet is a network.
• Except that SANS were meant for LANs
• And SANs allow hosts to talk to.... disks (or more likely, disk arrays, RAIDs, JBODs (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and similar beasts.
• Mind you - a RAID can be a small thing costing 10K$, or a large beast costing several 100K$.
• Most SANs employ the Fiber-Channel protocol, over fiber-optic links (1Gbps, 2Gbps, lately also 4Gbps)...
• ...thought someone from IBM will tell you that iSCSI is the wave of the future...
• ...and the real weirdos will say that Infiniband is king!

Originally written by guy keren