What does san mean in English?

San means storage area network in English.

1.

The storage area network (SAN) adopts mesh channel (FC, different from FiberChannel) technology, and connects the storage array and the server host through FC switches, thus establishing a local area network dedicated to data storage. After more than ten years of development, SAN has become quite mature and has become the de facto standard in the industry (however, the optical fiber switching technologies of various manufacturers are not exactly the same, and their servers and SAN storage have compatibility requirements).

SAN focuses on the unique problems of enterprise storage. At present, there are two sources of problems encountered in enterprise storage solutions: structural limitations caused by the close combination of data and application systems, and limitations of SCSI standards. Most analysts believe that SAN is the future enterprise storage solution, because it is easy to integrate, can improve data availability and network performance, and can also reduce management work.

2. Structure

SAN is actually a private network specially built for storage, which is independent of TCP/IP network. At present, the general SAN provides the transmission rate of 2Gb/S to 4Gb/S, and the SAN network exists independently of the data network, so the access speed is very fast. In addition, SAN generally adopts high-end RAID array, which makes the performance of SAN stand out among several professional storage schemes.

Because SAN is based on private network, it is very scalable, and it is very convenient to add some storage space in a SAN system or several servers that use storage space. Through the tape drive with SAN interface, SAN system can realize centralized backup of data conveniently and efficiently.

3. Advantages

SAN provides a simple way to connect existing LAN, and supports widely used SCSI and IP protocols through the same physical channel. SAN is not limited by the current mainstream layout based on SCSI storage structure. More importantly, with the explosive growth of storage capacity, SAN allows enterprises to increase storage capacity independently.

The structure of SAN allows any server to connect to any storage array, so that the server can directly access the required data no matter where the data is placed. Because of the fiber interface, SAN also has higher bandwidth.