1. What is a storage area network?
A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer storage devices such as disk arrays, tape libraries to servers, in such as way that the storage devices appears locally to the operating system.
By contrast to a SAN, network-attached storage uses file-based protocols such as NFS or SMB/CIFS where it is clear that the storage is remote, and computers request a portion of an abstract file rather than a disk block.
A computer cluster is a group of tightly coupled computers that work together so that in many respects they can be viewed as through they are a single computer.
2. Why we need storage area network?
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3. How does a storage area network work?
Most storage networks use the SCSI protocol for communication between servers and disk drive devices, though they do not use its low-level physical interface, instead using a mapping layer, such as the FCP mapping standard.
- Fibre Channel, currently the most common. Comes in 1 Gbit/s, 2 Gbit/s, 4 Gbit/s, and 8 Gbit/s variants (10 Gbit/s is under development)
- iSCSI, mapping SCSI over TCP/IP
- HyperSCSI, mapping SCSI over Ethernet
- ATA over Ethernet, mapping ATA over Ethernet
- InfiniBand (IB), supports mapping SCSI over IB and/or mapping TCP/IP over IB
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