SAN Storage- How Does it Work & What is its Future?

SAN storage has been around for many years now and have become quite popular. This is due to the many benefits that it offers to enterprises and businesses that adopt it.

In this article, we will discuss iSCSI SAN storage in a little more detail and will answer questions like what is SAN storage, how does it work and what the future holds for SAN storage.

What is SAN Storage?

SAN storage is a high-speed network consisting of storage systems, storage management software, application servers and network hardware that allows users to access and enterprise data.

SAN Storage Hardware

SAN storage devices are usually connected by iSCSI or Fibre Channel (FC) network protocol hardware. Users have a choice to choose between the two protocols and chose the one that suits them best.

Usually small to medium businesses or SMBs choose iSCSI protocol over FC. This is because iSCSI is cost-efficient and SMBs do not need much performance as they do not have a lot of performance extensive tasks.

On the other hand, big enterprises and multi-national companies use FC protocol as it suits them best as they have high extensive workloads and tasks.

FC connectivity enables fast data throughput between the storage array and the attached server device. The data transfer speeds are also very high. They can range from 4 Gbps to 128 Gbps and even faster in some cases.

Speed mainly varies by vendor and also the type of the SAN technology used. However, the very latest storage fabric can now break 200 Gbps transfer rates which is more than impressive.

How Does SAN Storage Work?

SAN storage uses block level storage to present raw data or raw storage to a logical unit which is then presented to the target storage. In SAN storage, the logical unit can only be read by a storage controller and interpreted by the operating system initiator. Each logical unit is given a unique identifier by the SAN and the server’s hardware controller and software initiator is configured with the same logical unit ID to interact with RAW data.

The Future of SAN Storage

Over the years, SAN storage has evolved greatly. iSCSI storage devices has used block storage for so long that everybody automatically thinks that it is only a block storage solution, whereas this is not the case anymore. Nowadays there is unified SAN storage and converged SAN storage as well. This can meet the demand of the increasing data amount as it can offer better availability, fault-tolerance and scalability, amongst many other features.

Conclusion

SAN storage has evolved significantly over the past years. It is not just block storage; it is a lot more. With the introduction of unified SAN and converged SAN, SAN storage offers so many benefits that makes it an ideal data storage solution for enterprises of today.