
4.5 Leveraging storage technologies 237
Chapter 4
With ports being a scarce resource in SAN environment, because
switches are relatively expensive, a new approach has been considered in the
past couple of years by utilizing a series of switches at the center (core) of the
Fibre Channel fabric, and another series of switches for connecting to this
core, at the edge of the fabric. Core switches can scale up in ports and perfor-
mance and run multiple protocols (particularly interesting for consolidation
of networking infrastructures for mixed iSCSI and SAN deployments).
Known as a Core-Edge SAN infrastructure, this type of approach is
schematized in F