Acknowledgments

In writing the current edition of Designing Storage Area Networks I have been the beneficiary of the hard work done by thousands of others over the past decade of SAN development. Explaining how a technology works is trivial compared with the enormous effort required to define and produce viable solutions. I therefore first of all wish to acknowledge, collectively, the technologists, engineers, architects, implementers, systems engineers, support personnel, end users, and yes, even marketers, who have helped to shape the diversity of products and applications that have enabled storage networking. Storage networking is an enabling technology for ready access to information, which in turn holds promise for improving our common condition.

I would like to thank Karen Gettman, my editor, and Emily Frey and the staff at Addison-Wesley for managing this project and facilitating the reviews and compilation of the manuscript. Without their constant support and efficiency in handling publication issues, seeing this work through to completion would not have been possible.

I would also like to thank my peers who reviewed the text, offering suggestions and corrections to the draft manuscript. My thanks to Larry Krantz, Charles Monia, Milan Merhar, Bob Snead, and Gary Orenstein for their endurance and their input on the technical and literary aspects of this work.

My frontline editor and wife, Lou Clark, has now become accustomed to the spousal abandonment that a book project implies. The several months of lost weekends, solitary evenings, techno-babbling, and occasional grumpiness of the author would no doubt have been unbearable had it not been punctuated by the Pacific salmon and halibut runs, the alder smoke from the Lynx grill, the bounty of the eastern Washington vineyards, and the excellent food at Kanishka's Cuisine of India in downtown Redmond, Washington. Constant and enduring thanks to Lou for reminding me that man cannot, after all, live on command descriptor blocks and protocol primitives alone.

This book has repeated references to the Storage Networking Industry Association, on whose board I sit. Funded primarily by storage and storage networking vendors and staffed primarily by volunteers from member companies, the SNIA has attracted great talent and expertise to fulfill its mission of ensuring that storage networks become complete and trusted solutions across the IT community. Work on standards requirements for new storage technologies, standards compliance, interoperability, management, education, and other efforts requires consistent focus and dedication, and the people who have undertaken these tasks on behalf of the IT community are seldom publicly recognized for their work. I therefore would like to acknowledge all the volunteer technologists who have invested their time and energy in SNIA technical workgroups, committees, forums, and the Technical Council and board, as well as the companies and academic institutions who have sponsored them.

Thanks, too, to Jim Vale of Network Associates, who early on recognized the value of SANs for IP networking diagnostics and is helping to bring storage awareness to the mainstream IT community.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the customers who have provided valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of SAN solutions in practical deployments. Many thanks to the members of the SNIA Customer Executive Council and the SNIA Customer Advisory Council, and in particular to Gary Johnson and Mark Price of Carlson Companies and to John Alley, Brad Basden (and friends), and Mark Licata of Microsoft Corporation.

Tom Clark
Seattle
designing.sans@verizon.net



Designing Storage Area Networks(c) A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel and IP SANs
Designing Storage Area Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel and IP SANs (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0321136500
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 171
Authors: Tom Clark

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net