Storage area network

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Not to be confused with Network attached storage.

A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer storage

devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes) to servers in such a
way that the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system. A SAN typically
is its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the regular
network by regular devices. The cost and complexity of SANs has dropped in recent
years,[when?] resulting in much wider adoption across both enterprise and small to medium
sized business environments.[citation needed]

A SAN alone does not provide the "file" abstraction, only block-level operations.
However, file systems built on top of SANs do provide this abstraction, and are known as
SAN filesystems or shared disk file systems.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Storage sharing
o 1.1 SAN and NAS
o 1.2 SAN-NAS hybrid
• 2 Benefits
• 3 Network types
• 4 SAN infrastructure
• 5 Compatibility
• 6 SANs at home
• 7 SANs in media and entertainment
• 8 Storage virtualization
• 9 See also
• 10 References

• 11 External links

[edit] Storage sharing

Organization

Historically, data centers first created "islands" of SCSI disk arrays as direct-attached
storage (DAS), each dedicated to an application, and visible as a number of "virtual hard
drives" (i.e. LUNs). Essentially, a SAN consolidates such storage islands together using a
high-speed network.

Operating systems maintain their own file systems on them on dedicated, non-shared
LUNS, as though they were local to themselves. If multiple systems were simply to
attempt to share a LUN, these would interfere with each other and quickly corrupt the
data. Any planned sharing of data on different computers within a LUN requires
advanced solutions, such as SAN file systems or clustered computing.

Despite such issues, SANs help to increase storage capacity utilization, since multiple
servers consolidate their private storage space onto the disk arrays.

Common uses of a SAN include provision of transactionally accessed data that require
high-speed block-level access to the hard drives such as email servers, databases, and
high usage file servers.

[edit] SAN and NAS

In contrast to SAN, network attached storage (NAS) uses file-based protocols such as
NFS or SMB/CIFS where it is clear that the storage is remote, and computers request a
portion of an abstract file rather than a disk block. Recently,[when?] the introduction of NAS
heads[clarification needed] has allowed easy conversion of SAN storage to NAS.

[edit] SAN-NAS hybrid

Hybrid using DAS, NAS and SAN technologies.

Despite the differences between SAN and NAS, it is possible to create solutions that
include both technologies, as shown in the diagram.

[edit] Benefits
Sharing storage usually simplifies storage administration and adds flexibility since cables
and storage devices do not have to be physically moved to shift storage from one server
to another.

Other benefits include the ability to allow servers to boot from the SAN itself. This
allows for a quick and easy replacement of faulty servers since the SAN can be
reconfigured so that a replacement server can use the LUN of the faulty server. This
process can take as little as half an hour and is a relatively new idea being pioneered in
newer data centers. There are a number of emerging products designed to facilitate and
speed this up still further. Brocade, for example, offers an Application Resource Manager
product which automatically provisions servers to boot off a SAN, with typical-case load
times measured in minutes. While this area of technology is still new many view it as
being the future of the enterprise datacenter [1].

SANs also tend to enable more effective disaster recovery processes. A SAN could span
a distant location containing a secondary storage array. This enables storage replication
either implemented by disk array controllers, by server software, or by specialized SAN
devices. Since IP WANs are often the least costly method of long-distance transport, the
Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and iSCSI protocols have been developed to allow SAN
extension over IP networks. The traditional physical SCSI layer could only support a few
meters of distance - not nearly enough to ensure business continuance in a disaster.

The economic consolidation of disk arrays has accelerated the advancement of several
features including I/O caching, snapshotting, and volume cloning (Business Continuance
Volumes or BCVs).

[edit] Network types

Most storage networks use the SCSI protocol for communication between servers and
disk drive devices. A mapping layer to other protocols is used to form a network:

• ATA over Ethernet (AoE), mapping of ATA over Ethernet

• Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), the most prominent one, is a mapping of SCSI
over Fibre Channel
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
• ESCON over Fibre Channel (FICON), used by mainframe computers
• HyperSCSI, mapping of SCSI over Ethernet
• iFCP[2] or SANoIP[3] mapping of FCP over IP
• iSCSI, mapping of SCSI over TCP/IP
• iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), mapping of iSCSI over InfiniBand

Storage networks may also be built using SAS and SATA technologies. SAS evolved
from SCSI direct-attached storage. SATA evolved from IDE direct-attached storage. SAS
and SATA devices can be networked using SAS Expanders.

[edit] SAN infrastructure

Qlogic SAN-switch with optical Fibre Channel connectors installed.

SANs often utilise a Fibre Channel fabric topology - an infrastructure specially designed
to handle storage communications. It provides faster and more reliable access than
higher-level protocols used in NAS. A fabric is similar in concept to a network segment
in a local area network. A typical Fibre Channel SAN fabric is made up of a number of
Fibre Channel switches.

Today, all major SAN equipment vendors also offer some form of Fibre Channel routing
solution, and these bring substantial scalability benefits to the SAN architecture by
allowing data to cross between different fabrics without merging them. These offerings
use proprietary protocol elements, and the top-level architectures being promoted are
radically different. They often enable mapping Fibre Channel traffic over IP or over
SONET/SDH.

[edit] Compatibility
One of the early problems with Fibre Channel SANs was that the switches and other
hardware from different manufacturers were not entirely compatible. Although the basic
storage protocols FCP were always quite standard, some of the higher-level functions did
not interoperate well. Similarly, many host operating systems would react badly to other
operating systems sharing the same fabric. Many solutions were pushed to the market
before standards were finalised and vendors have since innovated around the standards.

[edit] SANs at home

A SAN, being a network of large disk arrays, is primarily used in large scale, high
performance enterprise storage operations. SAN equipment is relatively expensive and so
fibre channel host bus adapters are rare in desktop computers. The iSCSI SAN
technology is expected to eventually produce cheap SANs, but it is unlikely[citation needed]
that this technology will be used outside the enterprise data center environment. Desktop
clients are expected to continue using NAS protocols such as SMB and NFS. The
exception to this may be remote storage replication.

[edit] SANs in media and entertainment

Video editing workgroups require very high data transfer rates. Outside of the enterprise
market, this is one area that greatly benefits from SANs.

Per-node bandwidth usage control, sometimes referred to as Quality of Service (QoS), is

especially important in video workgroups as it ensures fair and prioritized bandwidth
usage across the network if there is insufficient open bandwidth available. Avid Unity,
Apple's Xsan and Tiger Technology MetaSAN are specifically designed for video
networks and offer this functionality.

[edit] Storage virtualization

Storage virtualization refers to the process of completely abstracting logical storage from
physical storage. The physical storage resources are aggregated into storage pools, from
which the logical storage is created. It presents to the user a logical space for data storage
and transparently handles the process of mapping it to the actual physical location. This is
implemented in modern disk arrays, using vendor proprietary solutions. However, the
goal is to virtualize multiple disk arrays from different vendors, scattered over the
network, into a single monolithic storage device, which can be managed uniformly.

Storage area network

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Not to be confused with Network attached storage.
A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer storage
devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes) to servers in such a
way that the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system. A SAN typically
is its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the regular
network by regular devices. The cost and complexity of SANs has dropped in recent
years,[when?] resulting in much wider adoption across both enterprise and small to medium
sized business environments.[citation needed]

A SAN alone does not provide the "file" abstraction, only block-level operations.
However, file systems built on top of SANs do provide this abstraction, and are known as
SAN filesystems or shared disk file systems.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Storage sharing
o 1.1 SAN and NAS
o 1.2 SAN-NAS hybrid
• 2 Benefits
• 3 Network types
• 4 SAN infrastructure
• 5 Compatibility
• 6 SANs at home
• 7 SANs in media and entertainment
• 8 Storage virtualization
• 9 See also
• 10 References

• 11 External links

[edit] Storage sharing

Organization
Historically, data centers first created "islands" of SCSI disk arrays as direct-attached
storage (DAS), each dedicated to an application, and visible as a number of "virtual hard
drives" (i.e. LUNs). Essentially, a SAN consolidates such storage islands together using a
high-speed network.

Operating systems maintain their own file systems on them on dedicated, non-shared
LUNS, as though they were local to themselves. If multiple systems were simply to
attempt to share a LUN, these would interfere with each other and quickly corrupt the
data. Any planned sharing of data on different computers within a LUN requires
advanced solutions, such as SAN file systems or clustered computing.

Despite such issues, SANs help to increase storage capacity utilization, since multiple
servers consolidate their private storage space onto the disk arrays.

Common uses of a SAN include provision of transactionally accessed data that require
high-speed block-level access to the hard drives such as email servers, databases, and
high usage file servers.

[edit] SAN and NAS

In contrast to SAN, network attached storage (NAS) uses file-based protocols such as
NFS or SMB/CIFS where it is clear that the storage is remote, and computers request a
portion of an abstract file rather than a disk block. Recently,[when?] the introduction of NAS
heads[clarification needed] has allowed easy conversion of SAN storage to NAS.

[edit] SAN-NAS hybrid

Hybrid using DAS, NAS and SAN technologies.

Despite the differences between SAN and NAS, it is possible to create solutions that
include both technologies, as shown in the diagram.

[edit] Benefits
Sharing storage usually simplifies storage administration and adds flexibility since cables
and storage devices do not have to be physically moved to shift storage from one server
to another.

Other benefits include the ability to allow servers to boot from the SAN itself. This
allows for a quick and easy replacement of faulty servers since the SAN can be
reconfigured so that a replacement server can use the LUN of the faulty server. This
process can take as little as half an hour and is a relatively new idea being pioneered in
newer data centers. There are a number of emerging products designed to facilitate and
speed this up still further. Brocade, for example, offers an Application Resource Manager
product which automatically provisions servers to boot off a SAN, with typical-case load
times measured in minutes. While this area of technology is still new many view it as
being the future of the enterprise datacenter [1].

SANs also tend to enable more effective disaster recovery processes. A SAN could span
a distant location containing a secondary storage array. This enables storage replication
either implemented by disk array controllers, by server software, or by specialized SAN
devices. Since IP WANs are often the least costly method of long-distance transport, the
Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and iSCSI protocols have been developed to allow SAN
extension over IP networks. The traditional physical SCSI layer could only support a few
meters of distance - not nearly enough to ensure business continuance in a disaster.

The economic consolidation of disk arrays has accelerated the advancement of several
features including I/O caching, snapshotting, and volume cloning (Business Continuance
Volumes or BCVs).

[edit] Network types

Most storage networks use the SCSI protocol for communication between servers and
disk drive devices. A mapping layer to other protocols is used to form a network:

• ATA over Ethernet (AoE), mapping of ATA over Ethernet

• Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), the most prominent one, is a mapping of SCSI
over Fibre Channel
• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
• ESCON over Fibre Channel (FICON), used by mainframe computers
• HyperSCSI, mapping of SCSI over Ethernet
• iFCP[2] or SANoIP[3] mapping of FCP over IP
• iSCSI, mapping of SCSI over TCP/IP
• iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), mapping of iSCSI over InfiniBand

Storage networks may also be built using SAS and SATA technologies. SAS evolved
from SCSI direct-attached storage. SATA evolved from IDE direct-attached storage. SAS
and SATA devices can be networked using SAS Expanders.
[edit] SAN infrastructure

Qlogic SAN-switch with optical Fibre Channel connectors installed.

SANs often utilise a Fibre Channel fabric topology - an infrastructure specially designed
to handle storage communications. It provides faster and more reliable access than
higher-level protocols used in NAS. A fabric is similar in concept to a network segment
in a local area network. A typical Fibre Channel SAN fabric is made up of a number of
Fibre Channel switches.

Today, all major SAN equipment vendors also offer some form of Fibre Channel routing
solution, and these bring substantial scalability benefits to the SAN architecture by
allowing data to cross between different fabrics without merging them. These offerings
use proprietary protocol elements, and the top-level architectures being promoted are
radically different. They often enable mapping Fibre Channel traffic over IP or over
SONET/SDH.

[edit] Compatibility
One of the early problems with Fibre Channel SANs was that the switches and other
hardware from different manufacturers were not entirely compatible. Although the basic
storage protocols FCP were always quite standard, some of the higher-level functions did
not interoperate well. Similarly, many host operating systems would react badly to other
operating systems sharing the same fabric. Many solutions were pushed to the market
before standards were finalised and vendors have since innovated around the standards.

[edit] SANs at home

A SAN, being a network of large disk arrays, is primarily used in large scale, high
performance enterprise storage operations. SAN equipment is relatively expensive and so
fibre channel host bus adapters are rare in desktop computers. The iSCSI SAN
technology is expected to eventually produce cheap SANs, but it is unlikely[citation needed]
that this technology will be used outside the enterprise data center environment. Desktop
clients are expected to continue using NAS protocols such as SMB and NFS. The
exception to this may be remote storage replication.
[edit] SANs in media and entertainment
Video editing workgroups require very high data transfer rates. Outside of the enterprise
market, this is one area that greatly benefits from SANs.

Per-node bandwidth usage control, sometimes referred to as Quality of Service (QoS), is

especially important in video workgroups as it ensures fair and prioritized bandwidth
usage across the network if there is insufficient open bandwidth available. Avid Unity,
Apple's Xsan and Tiger Technology MetaSAN are specifically designed for video
networks and offer this functionality.

[edit] Storage virtualization

Storage virtualization refers to the process of completely abstracting logical storage from
physical storage. The physical storage resources are aggregated into storage pools, from
which the logical storage is created. It presents to the user a logical space for data storage
and transparently handles the process of mapping it to the actual physical location. This is
implemented in modern disk arrays, using vendor proprietary solutions. However, the
goal is to virtualize multiple disk arrays from different vendors, scattered over the
network, into a single monolithic storage device, which can be managed uniformly.

SAN: Storage Area Networks

Definition: A SAN is a dedicated network that is separate from LANs and WANs. It is
generally used to connect all the storage resources connected to various servers. It
consists of a collection of SAN Hardware and SAN software; the hardware typically has
high inter-connection rates between the various storage devices and the software
manages, monitors and configures the SAN.
From webopedia: Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed subnetwork of shared
storage devices. A storage device is a machine that contains nothing but a disk or disks
for storing data.

A SAN's architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all
servers on a LAN or WAN. As more storage devices are added to a SAN, they too will be
accessible from any server in the larger network. In this case, the server merely acts as a
pathway between the end user and the stored data

From Enterprise Storage Forum: A SAN is a network of storage devices that are
connected to each other and to a server...in some configurations a SAN is also connected
to the network. ... it is forecast to become the data storage technology of choice in the
coming years.

SANs originated to overcome the problems with network attached storage (NAS)
devices, which - like ordinary servers - are difficult to manage and difficult to expand the
capacity on. NAS devices also add to the traffic on the network and suffer from the
delays introduced by the operating systems' network stacks.

A SAN is made up of a number of fabric switches

connected in a network. The most common form of SAN
uses the Fibre Channel fabric protocol (with Fibre
Channel switches). Alternatively ISCSI could be used
with IP switches.

Connected to the SAN will be one or more Disk array controllers and one or more
servers. The SAN allows the storage space on the hard disks in the Disk array controllers
to be shared amongst the servers. More on Storage Area Network

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