Re: How does a SAN connect to a computer?

Haven't read anything yet that really describes it, a SAN, in simple terms is like a cloud of storage, let's say 10TB for example. The management software allows you to dynamically allocate the space, which is quite cool. So essentially, you are creating mini drives within the SAN which can contain the boot drive (no drive on the workstation). If you have 50+ computers, this can be quite powerful. Think of the hard drive like how a VM machine works. The drive is all dynamic. The only difference for a SAN is that it is located on a storage server rather than a local machine.

When your computer boots, it boots off the allocated SAN space on the SAN server. If you need more space, the administrator simply allocates more space of the SAN to your drive allocated on the SAN.

If the overall SAN is out of space, you can add more drives to the SAN drive which then can be used/allocated anywhere.


"Ian Boyd" <ian.borlandnews010@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4884eb48$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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?


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