Chapter 3. 21st Century Oxymorons: Jumbo Shrimp and Fibre Channel SAN

In the last chapter, we looked at the marketecture around networked storage generally ”and the Fibre Channel SAN, in particular. SANs originated as a conceptual topology for storage that provided network-based interconnections between servers and an intelligent storage infrastructure, sometimes called a "storage pool" or "storage utility."

Such a SAN was heterogeneous in nature, allowing for the any-to-any interconnection of servers with different operating systems to storage platforms from different vendors . The SAN was also intelligent, capable of recognizing the needs of applications requesting storage services and automatically provisioning applications with whatever storage services that they required. The enhanced manageability of a SAN gave it tremendous integrity as a highly available repository for mission critical data storage. And, SAN security would be more than sufficient to offset the increased risk that unavoidably accompanies increased accessibility.

Figures 3-1 and 3-2 depict the "Holy Grail" SAN as described in Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) documentation from Compaq Computers and related writings of the late 1990s.

Figure 3-1. The Holy Grail SAN: Heterogeneous storage and server equipment with any-to-any network-based connectivity.

Figure 3-2. The Holy Grail SAN: A virtual storage resource pool.

The ENSA SAN concept was truly visionary and captured the attention of storage technology producers and consumers. If it came to fruition, the SAN would establish data storage as its own infrastructure ”creating a new service tier in the hierarchy of contemporary n -tier client/server computing. It could conceivably make storage infrastructure the solid, well-anchored foundation upon which networks, servers, and applications resided.

In the late 1990s, vendors and pundits alike said that the SAN was an intuitively obvious " next step" in computing. Storage was getting cheaper, with disk prices declining by as much as 50 percent per year. At the same time, however, the volume of data being stored was increasing ”by more than 100 percent per year in some companies. That meant more and more storage needed to be fielded, and a lot of storage ”like a lot of anything ”carried with it a big price tag, both in terms of acquisition and deployment costs and labor expense.