What are Storage Area Networks?
Advantages of SANs
Storage Area Networks (SANs) allow storage devices to exist on their own separate network and communicate directly with each other over very fast media. SANs address the bandwidth bottlenecks commonly associated with LAN-based server storage and the scalability limitations found with SCSI bus based implementations.
The advantages of SANs are numerous, but perhaps one of the best examples is that of the serverless backup. This system allows a disk storage device to copy data directly to a backup device across the high-speed links of the SAN without any intervention from a server. Data is kept on the SAN, which means the transfer does not pollute the LAN, and the server processing resources are still available to client systems. These advantages have led to an increase in the popularity of SANs as they are better suited to address the data storage needs of data-intensive networks.
