Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information in Classic, Virtualized, and Cloud Environments, Second Edition

Chapter 5

Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks

Key Concepts

Fibre Channel (FC) Architecture

Fibre Channel Protocol Stack

Ports in Fibre Channel SAN

Fibre Channel Addressing

World Wide Names

Zoning

Fibre Channel SAN Topologies

Block-level Storage Virtualization

Virtual SAN

Organizations are experiencing an explosive growth in information. This information needs to be stored, protected, optimized, and managed efficiently. Data center managers are burdened with the challenging task of providing low-cost, high-performance information management solutions. An effective information management solution must provide the following:

• Just-in-time information to business users: Information must be available to business users when they need it. 24 × 7 data availability is becoming one of the key requirements of today's storage infrastructure. The explosive growth in storage, proliferation of new servers and applications, and the spread of mission-critical data throughout enterprises are some of the challenges that need to be addressed to provide information availability in real time.
• Integration of information infrastructure with business processes: The storage infrastructure should be integrated with various business processes without compromising its security and integrity.
• Flexible and resilient storage infrastructure: The storage infrastructure must provide flexibility and resilience that aligns with changing business requirements. Storage should scale without compromising the performance ...