Reply to rant: [olug] server life span

[bbrush at unlnotes.unl.edu]

A SAN (Storage Area Network) moves the physical storage from the server to
a central appliance.  The server gets a fibrechannel card which appears to
the OS as a SCSI controller.  The FC card connects to the SAN appliance
which presents to the server OS x-number of virtual disks.  With some SAN's
you can even have boot bios on the FC card to allow for the server to be
completely diskless.

The advantage of a diskless server is that you can swap out the server
hardware without losing your OS and data.  Just pull the FC card, replace
the server, put the FC card in the new server and turn it on.  Your done.

The real strength of a SAN is that you can manipulate your disks without
disturbing your data or taking your servers offline.   You can resize,
mirror, swap, and add disks without your users knowing anything.  Some SAN
appliances even allow you to upgrade your disks in the array without taking
it offline.

Bill

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                      "Don E. Kauffman"                                                                              
                      <dkauffman at tconl.        To:       olug at olug.org                                               
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                      Sent by:                 Subject:  Re: Reply to rant: [olug] server life span                  
                      olug-admin at olug.o                                                                              
                      rg                                                                                             
                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                     
                      09/26/2002 04:31                                                                               
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For those of us who are in the newbie category. what's a SAN? How is it
different than a normal server / network?

Thanks!

Don

O