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Essay on Storage Area Networks for Mass Storage Systems
This paper is on “Storage Area Networks for Mass Storage Systems”. Mass storage systems are not as widely used as floppy diskette, magnetic disk or magnetic tape. It is not certain that they will be widely used in the future. Nevertheless mass storage is another important storage medium, with a very great capacity. A mass storage system may be thought of as an on-line automated tape library with capacities in excess of 100 Gigabytes. Also, it looks like a very fast huge, hard disk server. Mass storage system usually implies a robotically controlled tape or disk library device or jukebox, which is itself managed by a file server. Low-end systems are used to backup PC/workstation LANs; high-end mass storage systems have many applications including virtual disk, backup and archives. The media used for long-term storage include tapes and optical disks. There are many applications for mass storage systems beyond the immediately obvious requirements for raw terabytes. Systems vendors need to be aware of the characteristics of mass storage to be able to identify valid uses for their products and demonstrate clear cost and functional advantages to prospective users. Obvious applications for mass storage systems exist in many industries. Oil exploration, weather research, and the aerospace industry are a few examples. These industries all collect massive amounts of data, process them with high intensity for a short period of time, and then store them that they can be reused with as little delay as possible when needed.
A SAN (storage area network) is a storage system consisting of storage fundamentals, storage devices, computer systems, and/or appliances, plus all control software, communicating over a system. The most important reason of a SAN is the transfer of data between computer systems and storage elements and among 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 more often than not identified with block I/O services rather than file access services (which are better handled by NAS). Although most storage is still direct attached, the last few years have seen an increase in networked storage, both in the form of SAN and NAS. (Chi Corporation (2003)
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high-speed special-purpose network that exists individually from the corporate network and runs on specific interfaces, such as Fibre Channel or a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), that transfer data quickly between storage devices. Sharing storage resources among multiple servers or workstations requires a peer-to-peer network that joins targets to initiators. The composition of that network and the type of storage data traversing it vary from one architecture to another. Usually, shared storage architectures divide into storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS). For SANs, the network infrastructure may be Fibre Channel or Gigabit Ethernet, and the type of storage data being transported is block Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) data. For NAS, the network infrastructure is characteristically Ethernet (Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet), and the type of storage data carried across the network is file-based. At the most abstract level, then, the common denominator between SAN and NAS is that both enable sharing of storage resources by multiple initiators, whether block-based or file-based....
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