Storage Area Networks (SANs)
Abstract
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is usually defined as a “network that provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage” . A SAN is therefore inherently different to a Network File System such as NFS as it does not provide file level access to clients but instead provides access to a block device over a network.
As you would expect there are a wide array of different SAN solutions offering an equally wide array of features. In this section we shall focus on producing Storage Area Networks offering advanced features such as distributed fault-tolerance.
