With today's ever-increasing storage needs, and ever-shrinking backup windows, companies are outgrowing the capabilities of traditional direct-attached storage. A storage area network (SAN) is one solution to this challenge. SANs provide a storage infrastructure that resides on its own private network, not tied to any one server, that can be allocated and reallocated as required. A SAN is not an easy thing to build or manage, however. This report describes the technologies involved, and discusses some of the issues involved in implementation.
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