SANs provide high-speed access to distributed storage via fibre channel (FC) technology. EMC is a member of SNIA, and behind their work, but the FibreAlliance was born out of the sheer frustration of advancing SANs, as things stood.
Its analysts predicted the European market for Storage Area Networks (SANs) would grow from $1.92bn last year to $64.11bn in 2006. Veritas reported first quarter revenues up 82 per cent, but speakers we interviewed at the company's annual user...
In a research note, Meta Group notes the take off of storage area networks (SANs) - servers accessing disk-based resources using the Fibre Channel protocol over dedicated networks - is driving some of this increase.
Interestingly, users are looking at adopting iSCSI for SANs.iSCSI allows SANs to use IP networks instead of Fibre Channel, and will be present in 25 per cent of the polled organisations in a year's time as opposed to just four per cent now.
Fibre Channel (FC), the dominant communications technology for SANs, is increasingly under the strain of distance. However, the performance of this approach is limited and it is in no way meant to replace SANs based on Fibre Channel.
Although the NAS-SAN crossover has begun, the trend will increase with the emergence of iSCSI, Cox said.iSCSI is an interface technology that allows SANs to be built using less-expensive Ethernet networks.