What Are SAN Storage Area Network
SANs offer centralised storage access that simplifies backup and recovery operations, as well as improved performance for enterprise workloads by eliminating competition between server traffic on the LAN and application traffic on its way into enterprise applications. A Storage Area Network is more flexible in scaling up or down than Ethernet networks due to its separate fabric dedicated solely to storage tasks, enabling IT staff to deploy more storage devices as necessary. Depending on its design, SANs can support thousands of host servers and storage devices simultaneously in a single deployment. A storage area network (SAN) comprises several hardware elements. It uses SCSI (small computer system interface) protocols to communicate on a block level, enabling users to transfer data directly between storage and server devices. SAN storage layers contain LUNs – logical storage entities organised into pools, tiers or types – that represent physical devices in various RAID groups for increased reliability and storage capacity. SANs provide high-speed, low-latency communications between network servers and storage devices. Most SANs use an architecture that collects storage devices into pools or tiers of various storage media types, including traditional magnetic hard disk drives, solid-state disks or even both. It can be connected using various types of hardware and software solutions, including Fiber Channel (FCP), Ethernet infrastructure solutions like FCoE or emerging technologies like NVMe over Fabrics. Physical storage devices used in a SAN are connected to servers through a dedicated communication system that separates storage traffic from traditional LAN traffic, helping optimise and accelerate performance by eliminating competition for the bandwidth needed by server workloads. As IT environments experience congestion, SAN storage resources may become overburdened and become overtaxed, leading to network slowdown and application performance degradation.
