Storage Area Networks For Dummies®

Part V. Understanding the Cool Stuff

In this part ...

This is the part you have been waiting for. Over the years since the first edition of this book was published, there have been major advancements in the technologies used for storage networking. The speed of the storage network has dramatically improved; the storage arrays have gone through major changes to incorporate new capabilities like snapshots and improved data replication. New storage protocols like iSCSI and Infiniband have been introduced, and even the disk drives themselves have matured with new technologies like Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) moving into storage arrays. But the most dramatic advances have taken place in the fabric itself.

Specialized solutions have been developed to work with the devices and data stored in the fabric to improve the backup process by continuously protecting every write operation to disk. The cost of implementing a SAN and data replication for disaster recovery has been reduced by removing any duplicate data being stored. And server and storage virtualization have begun to take hold to simplify management of physical resources and provisioning storage to the applications relying on the SAN. In this part, we cover the awesome technologies of Continuous Data Protection (CDP), data de-duplication, and duplication prevention, and how virtualization is making SAN management ...