What This Book Is About

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What This Book Is About

This book is a comprehensive introduction to Storage Area Networks for IT professionals who must gain familiarity with this new technology.

The purpose of this book is to familiarize you with SAN technology and demonstrate its practical application in the IT environment.

You may have read an article or two about SANs, or you may have read an entire book. Chances are, however, that you have not yet encountered enough material in one publication to give you a complete SAN picture. We have found that even highly experienced system or network professionals are unfamiliar with SAN functionality and terminology.

The book opens with the basics, looking at the core definition of a SAN, a historical perspective on traditional storage (and its limitations), and the rudiments of Fibre Channel, the enabling technology for the SAN.

The middle part of the book is intended to be a comprehensive rundown of the SAN: the many ways to configure a SAN, advice on building your own SAN from your current legacy equipment, the workings of SAN backup, and managing the SAN. There s also an extensive chapter describing Hewlett-Packard SAN products.

The final portion of the book is an exercise in predicting the future. We begin with a brief interview with Duane Zitzner, President of Computing Sys-tems at Hewlett-Packard, to provide a sense of HP s commitment to the SAN in the future.

We then anticipate how the SAN will promote dramatic changes in existing applications and will very likely create brand new applications. If technology moves at its present pace (and we have no reason to doubt that) many of our speculations will be turning into realities even as this book is published.

only for RuBoard - do not distribute or recompile