What is Storage area network and what are all the technical terms you used ?

SAN or storage area network is a high-speed network of shared storage devices ,thier controllers and monitoring software.A SAN system consists of storage elements, storage devices, computer systems, appliances, plus all control software, communicating over a network.

A network whose primary purpose is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements. A SAN consists of a communication infrastructure, which provides physical connections, and a management layer, which organizes the connections, storage elements, and computer systems so that data transfer is secure and robust. The term SAN is usually identified with block I/O services rather than file access services.

Storage Area Network - An example network given below.



More storage jobs information - Storage Area Network tutorials or SAN tutorials follows in the subsequent blog postings.

SANs are technically built on an infrastructure specially designed to handle storage communications. Storage area network tend to provide faster also more reliable access than higher level protocols such as NAS ( Network Attached Storage ).

The most common SAN technology by far is Fibre Channel networking (FC) with the SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) command set. A typical Fibre Channel SAN is made up of a number of Fibre Channel switches (FC switches are network devices ) which are connected together to form a fabric. A fabric is similar in concept to a segment in a local area network. Today, all major SAN equipment vendors also offer some form of Fibre Channel routing solution, and these bring substantial scalability benefits to the SAN architecture by allowing data to cross between different fabrics without merging them.

Job opportunities in SAN - Storage area networking

When extending Fibre Channel over long distances for disaster recovery solutions, it can be mapped over other protocols. For example, products exist to map Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and over SONET/SDH. It can also be extended natively using signal repeaters, high-power laser media, or multiplexers such as DWDMs.

Job Salary in SAN industry - How big they pay

An alternative SAN protocol is iSCSI which uses the same SCSI command set over TCP/IP (and, typically, Ethernet). In this case, the switches would be Ethernet switches. The iSCSI standard was ratified in 2003, so it has not yet had time to gather broad industry support. Fibre Channel has existed in production environments for over a decade and has already been widely deployed as strategic network infrastructure, so it will take iSCSI quite some time to make significant inroads into the installed-base of Fibre Channel SANs. It also underperforms Fibre Channel significantly, and may not be suitable for enterprise deployments. As a result, iSCSI is generally seen as being more of a competitor to NAS protocols such as CIFS and NFS.

Daily tasks of a SAN professionals office life

Another alternative to iSCSI is the ATA-over-Ethernet or AoE protocol which embeds the ATA protocol inside of raw Ethernet frames. While a raw Ethernet protocol like AoE cannot be routed without something else performing the encapsulation, it does provide a simple discovery model with low overhead.

I am new to SAN - I have some questions to ask

Connected to the SAN will be one or more servers (hosts) and one or more disk arrays, tape libraries, or other storage devices. In the case of a Fibre Channel SAN, the servers would use special Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and optical fiber. iSCSI SANs would normally use Ethernet network interface cards, and often specialized TOE cards.

Storage area networks are of two kinds - centralized storage area networks and distributed storage area networks . Find more information on Storage Area Network tutorials or SAN tutorials coming in this blog.
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1.What is SAN ?
2.What are the JOB opportunities in SAN ?
3.Which are the companies in SAN and How much they pay ?
4.How Can I Enter SAN industry ?
5.What are the tasks of a SAN professional- How will be a day in his office life?
6.How will be a SAN job interview ?
7.SAN or Storage engineer position - Interview questions : Series1
8.Real SAN Interview questions with answers: Series2
9.Answers for SAN interview questions Series1.
10.Tell me about some Job Openings in SAN or Storage industry?
11.Do You Want to see an Enterprise SAN infrastructure - Thanks to Dell - Watch this informative Video - See a High End Lab