Overview of Storage Networking and Storage Networks

This chapter presents an overview of storage networks and highlights the synergies and parallels between storage technologies and networking. It covers the history of storage networks and describes how they came to existence in data centers. The key concepts in storage networks are then introduced which goes through the storage networking stack from raw physical disks to file systems. The chapter is devoted to the various business and operational applications either realized or greatly facilitated by storage networks. It then dives into the various protocols specific to storage area networks, starting with the SCSI protocol and covering recent developments that start mixing pure storage technologies with IP-based networks. File serving protocols are discussed next. Finally, the chapter discusses virtualization, which is an emerging technology destined to significantly improve efficiency, scalability, and cost effectiveness of the data center architecture. Controlled Vocabulary Terms computer centres; storage area networks; virtualisation