Sans.

This versatility provides a level of investment protection for SAN hardware purchases not provided by Fibre Channel SANs.

Network address translation capabilities for its Inter-Virtual SAN routing (IVR) feature give storage area networking (SAN) administrators the ability to consolidate legacy SANs and share resources across heterogeneous SANs. Native interoperability with QLogic blade server switches allows users to deploy heterogeneous networks of Cisco and QLogic switches without the need to place either company's products in interop mode.

Fibre Channel is currently the dominant infrastructure for SANs. SAN technology places storage resources on a dedicated high-speed Fibre-Channel network.

Emulex: LP9002L HBA--Features automatic speed negotiation capability, which allows complete compatibility with existing 1Gb/s Fiber Channel SANs, while allowing seamless upgrades to higher speed 2Gb/s SANs. The LP9002L provides the flexibility and broad interoperability needed for complex highly scalable SANs.

Databases need block storage as do any applications that need to control their storage resource commonly found in SANs. File storage as found on Network Attached Storage (NAS) can be quick to install and configure for applications such as e-mail and others where file structure can be imposed by the storage device.

FibreArray 2208 is a SAN Storage Array with Dual Active Active RAID controllers for end-to-end Fibre Channel No Single Point of Failure SANs. No Single Point of Failure SANs provide the high availability, scalable capacity and performance, as well as multi-site capability required for 24x7 mission critical environments.

It enabled block-mode storage over Ethernet and so began a new chapter in the evolution of storage area networks: IP SANs.

Targeted at the early adopters of iSCSI solutions from small and midsize businesses to departments within large companies that are looking for the increased flexibility of Ethernet based SAN systems and a cost-effective, easy-to-use alternative to Fibre Channel SANs.

Adding more people is not an answer given the sheer complexity of managing and scaling SANs. A 100-server SAN requires maintenance of more than 20,000 actual access paths and 100,000 potential logical paths.

Adaptec's iSCSI products connect servers and storage devices in iSCSI SANs. Its ASIC-based iSCSI adapters provide unique protocol acceleration technology that offloads TCP/IP and iSCSI protocol processing from the host to reduce CPU utilization and free-up system resources.

The most commonly used storage protocol for medium and large companies is Fibre Channel, which is used to link servers to storage switches, storage switches to disk arrays, and disk arrays to each other within Storage Area Networks (SANs.) Most FC SANs currently run at 1 or 2 Gb/s, a data transfer speed which is adequate for many current storage needs.

As the need for information storage and backup continues to rise exponentially, many companies have migrated away from Fibre Channel SANs and NAS and begun investigating and implementing cost-effective IP SANs. IP SANs are storage networks connected over IP networks with information packets being sent within a SCSI command between an iSCSI initiator and iSCSI target.