For twenty years, the glacial pace of storage development gradually resulted in smaller, higher capacity disks and faster channel performance, but this evolutionary inertia was always bounded by a rigid master/slave relationship between hosts and storage. While the current market penetration of SAN-based solutions is only 20% of the total storage market, SANs are expected to capture the majority of the market within a few years.The emergence of storage networking represents the fusion of two distinct technologies, each with its own priorities, vocabulary and culture. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Dell and others now provide certified SAN configurations for performance, high availability and backup of storage data, while storage vendors such as EMC,Hitachi Data Systems, XIOtech and others offer SAN interfaces on their premier products. The success of SANs in establishing real end-user value is affirmed by the adoption of the technology by all major solution providers as their flagship server and storage offerings. Storage area networks are now recognized as the preferred solution for fulfilling a wide range of critical data storage needs for institutions and enterprises. While some of these technical initiatives are presented in my second book, IP SANs, A Guide to iSCSI, iFCP and FCIP Protocols for Storage Area Networks, this text provides more focus on the practical considerations implementers should consider in designing SAN solutions with today's diverse technologies. Advances in Fibre Channel performance and switch technology, the introduction of SANs based on TCP/IP and Gigabit Ethernet, and the emergence of storage virtualization have given customers more options for addressing their data storage needs. Due to the rapid growth and technical development within the storage industry over the past three years, however, new functionality and technology initiatives are already transforming the SAN landscape. At a thin 202 pages, that book was the first to provide a brief overview of storage area network (SAN) technology and was widely adopted as an introductory and training text for both vendors and customers. From the Book:The following work expands and updates the content of my previous book, Designing Storage Area Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel SANs, published in the winter of 1999.
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