Chapter 8. SAN Software Products

Storage area networking has led to the development of new software applications that leverage the potential of shared storage access. Because storage networking itself was encouraged by software application requirements for performance and resource sharing, the emergence of new storage-specific applications continues the symbiotic cycle of hardware and software evolution. High-availability storage access via server clustering, rationalized data backup and restore, disk-to-disk data replication, and file sharing utilities all these are predicated on a SAN infrastructure that provides peer-to-peer connectivity. This chapter examines some of the SAN-specific software applications that enhance data access. Later chapters discuss storage management and storage virtualization.