Designing Storage Area Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel and IP SANs (2nd Edition)

Storage networking has proven to be a disruptive technology, dramatically impacting applications and infrastructures as well as vendors and customers. SANs represent a positive paradigm shift from the previous generation of direct-attached storage, with storage networking itself undergoing further internal paradigm shifts with the development of storage virtualization and IP-based SANs. Because SAN technology is driven mainly by competition between vendors and the perpetual tug-of-war between vendors and myriad customers, there are few objective guideposts to shape its development. This is capitalism, after all, and not a technocracy driven by the pursuit of pristine solutions. In the end, the purchasing power of customers affirms or denies the viability of a technology and highlights its strengths and weaknesses. This chapter discusses the outstanding issues that the storage industry must address to remove the remaining obstacles to SAN adoption.