Introduction to SANs: Technology, Benefits, and Applications

For most business users the demand for storage is being stimulated by companies and users coming to the realization that the one thing on their computers they keep, upgrade after upgrade, generation after generation, are the stored data files.

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The rapidly growing demand for storage can affect any enterprise, be it a large company or a small office. Large companies can find great numbers of distinct storage devices expensive and complex to manage, especially when the storage devices are heterogeneous, that is, when they have a wide variety of different storage drives and device types to manage. Small offices can also feel the pinch of rapid storage growth when their storage consumption doubles every year, and they find they lack the information management personnel to modify their network infrastructure and applications to accommodate their expanding number of storage devices.

With the advent of SANs, IT managers finally have a way to aggregate storage resources to a central repository that not only easier to manage but more scalable and more reliable compared to current distributed storage infrastructures.