A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote with computer storage devices to servers in such a way that the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system.A SAN typically in its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the regular network by regular devices. The cost and complexity of SANs dropped in the late 2000′s, resulting in much wider adoption across both the enterprise and small to medium sized business environments.
Most storage networks are used with the SCSI protocol for communication between servers and disk drive devices. A mapping layer to other protocols is used to form a network:
* ATA over Ethernet (AoE),
* Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP),
* Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)
* ESCON over Fibre Channel (FICON),
* HyperSCSI, mapping of SCSI over Ethernet
* iFCP or SANoIP mapping of FCP over IP
* iSCSI, mapping of SCSI over TCP/IP
* iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER),
