How does a SAN connect to a computer?

i've heard of this mythical thing called a SAN (Storage Area Network). It's
not a hard drive. It's not a RAID array. It's not a fileserver on the
network. It's not a fast connection to a bunch of fast hard drives.

Wikipedia says that it's a special device that appears as though it's
locally attached, but really it's not:

"In computing, a storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach
remote computer storage devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries and
optical jukeboxes) to servers in such a way that, to the operating system,
the devices appear as locally attached."


They indicate that a SAN is a black-box that acts like a giant hard drive,
with mirroring, failover, expandable by adding more hard drives, etc.

So if it's external to the computer, you must connect to it somehow. But if
it acts like a hard-drive, it must be connected line a hard-drive.

Does a SAN connect to a pc using something like external SCSI (whether it be
fibre or not), or external SATA? Does it require a custom PCI expansion card
to do connection?


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How does a SAN connect to a computer?
    ... It's not a fileserver on the network. ... They indicate that a SAN is a black-box that acts like a giant hard drive, with mirroring, failover, expandable by adding more hard drives, etc. ... A raid array is a big box that has a lot of disks in it. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Promise VTRAK SAN box
    ... My understanding is that one of the main differences between NAS and SAN ... with 2 or more hard disks formatted with a file system such as NTFS. ... Network access to the disks is done using a file-level protocol. ... logical drives, could I remove one of the hard drives, put it ...
    (comp.arch.storage)
  • Re: How does a SAN connect to a computer?
    ... It's not a fileserver on the network. ... It's not a fast connection to a bunch of fast hard drives. ... FWIW, I've had the, um, joy of implementing, and replacing nearly all of the parts on, an EMC AX4-5i iSCSI SAN in the last two months. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Instant Replay/Live Editing on the fly
    ... I think what you need to do that is to hook up the editing system ... to a SAN, Storage Area Network. ... station, an ingest system, could be a mac laptop or mini, nothing ... running FCP and set to digitize your live source onto the SAN. ...
    (rec.video.production)
  • Re: High Availability
    ... You can always setup a relative cheap SAN by going with a smaller NetApp ... What I would like to do, is cluster 2 FE Exchange servers, cluster 2 BE ... info stores are placed on the shared hard drives and one of them lose ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.admin)