Choose How to Access Your Data Instead of Managing Your Storage

When I worked with my first SAN, it was the late nineties and I was leading a storage QA team at Digital.   Most servers at that time had hard disks directly attached, either internally or externally via parallel SCSI cables.  My team got a FC-AL based array to test.

These new ideas and companies that backed them changed the landscape of how enterprises managed their data, and spawned all manner of new jobs with required skills to manage their storage. Companies began adopting SANs at a rapid…Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop was the state-of-the-art and fortunately short-lived predecessor to switch-based SAN connectivity methods that are still in use today. However, the core SAN concepts introduced in the late 1990’s are the same core concepts in today’s SANs: centralize the management of your storage, eliminate unused islands of capacity, and gain better performance by spreading workloads across multiple disks.