19
OVERVIEW OF STORAGE NETWORKING AND STORAGE NETWORKS
19.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents an overview of storage networks and highlights the synergies and parallels between storage technologies and networking. While lesser known to computer networks specialists, storage networking technology is a field rapidly growing in importance. Additionally, recent protocol developments are merging common data and emerging storage networking technologies in the data centers.
Section 19.2 covers the history of storage networks and describes how they came to existence in data centers. The key concepts in storage networks are then introduced in Section 19.3, which goes through the storage networking stack from raw physical disks to file systems. This section also introduces the difference between storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS).
Section 19.4 is devoted to the various business and operational applications either realized or greatly facilitated by storage networks. Section 19.5 then dives into the various protocols specific to storage area networks, starting with the SCSI protocol and covering recent developments that start mixing pure storage technologies with IP-based networks. File serving protocols are discussed in Section 19.6. Finally, Section 19.7 is dedicated to virtualization, which is an emerging technology destined to significantly improve efficiency, scalability, and cost effectiveness of the data ...
