Chapter 5. The Quest for Networked Storage: Many Roads to Rome

The preceding chapters have illuminated the information gap that persists around networked storage. Erroneous impressions of storage networking technology, fostered by an abundance of vendor marketing hype, bear little resemblance to the actual capabilities and limitations of products and topologies that are grouped under this broad category.

This chapter moves the discussion out of the realm of marketecture into the realm of storage architecture. In order to begin assessing how current storage technology, networked or not, may be harnessed to solve real world problems, you need to look beyond the hype and at the particular storage requirements manifested by applications themselves .