SAN (Storage Area Network) is a dedicated high-speed network that interconnects and presents shared pools of storage devices to many servers. In a storage area network, a layer of management software separates the pooled storage resources and the servers that access the storage. This software allows information technology administrators to centralize and manage multiple storage resources as if it were one consolidated resource. Because of the software, each of the servers can see only one storage device, while each of the storage devices in the SAN can see just one server. You can move data at will to any of the devices on a SAN. The 2 types of SAN solutions are:

• Internet Small Computer System Interface Protocol.
• Fiber channel.

SAN helps you consolidate all your business data on to a single storage appliance. The storage disk drives run on a local area or wide area network. Details about the advantages of SAN are below:

• Centralized backup that lets your servers view stored data on local disks instead of on multiple server and disk connections.
• High-speed disk technology.
• Dynamic Failover Protection that provides continuous network operation. This enables built-in redundancy and automatic traffic rerouting.
• Storage Virtualization makes big and consolidated storage pools available for software applications.

SAN provides better disk utilization. Storage connected through a centralized storage network gives you the ability to manage everything as a single entity, slice up your central pool of storage resources at the network level and assign that storage more intelligently to the servers that need it.

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