  the storage infrastructure is the foundation on which information relies and
therefore must support a company's business objectives and business model. In
this environment, simply deploying more and faster storage devices is not
enough; a new kind of infrastructure is needed, one that provides more enhanced
network availability, data accessibility, and system manageability than is
provided by today's infrastructure. The SAN meets this challenge. The SAN
liberates the storage device, so it is not on a particular server bus, and
attaches it directly to the network. In other words, storage is externalized
and functionally distributed across the organization. The SAN also enables the
centralizing of storage devices and the clustering of servers, which makes for
easier and less expensive administration. So the idea is to create an
intelligent SAN infrastructure that stretches to meet increased demands, allows
highly available and heterogeneous access to expanding information.
