Storage Area Network (SAN)

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Storage area networks (SANs) are the most usual storage networking design used by organizations for business-critical applications that need to deliver high output and low latency. A fast growing portion of SAN deployments leverages all-flash storage to increase its high performance, constant low latency, and lower total cost when compared to spinning disk. By storing data in centralized shared storage, SANs enable organizations to apply consistent approaches and tools for safety, data protection, and disaster recovery.

A Storage Area Network is block-based storage, leveraging a high-speed architecture that links servers to their logical disk units (LUNs). A LUN is a variety of blocks provisioned from a pool of mutual storage and presented to the server as a logical disk. The server partitions and formats those blocks—typically with a file system—so that it can pile data on the LUN just as it would on local disk storage.

SANs make up about two-thirds of the whole networked storage market. They are designed to eliminate single points of failure, making SANs greatly available and resilient. A well-designed SAN can simply withstand multiple component or device failures.

Types of SAN

The most common storage area network protocols are:

• Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI). The next greatest SAN or block protocol, with around 10% to 15% of the market. iSCSI summarizes SCSI commands inside an Ethernet frame and then uses an IP Ethernet network for transport.

• Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP). The most broadly used SAN or block protocol, organized in 70% to 80% of the total SAN market. FCP uses Fibre Channel transport protocols with rooted SCSI commands.

• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). FCoE is less than 5% of the SAN market place. It is parallel to iSCSI, since it encapsulates an FC frame inside an Ethernet datagram. Then like iSCSI, it uses an IP Ethernet network for transport.

• Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fibre Channel (FC-NVMe). NVMe is an interface protocol for retrieving flash storage via a PCI Express (PCIe) bus. Unlike traditional all-flash designs, which are limited to a single, serial control queue, NVMe supports tens of thousands of similar queues, each with the ability to support tens of thousands of concurrent commands.

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