SAN STORAGE


The storage infrastructure is where confidenntial and critical data ultimately resides.
therefore,the storage infrastructure has to be fast,capable of storaing large volumes(to prevent it being scattered over various storage devices),
easily accessible,manageble,and secure.




The various storage devices are:


1.JBODS
2.Disk storage systems
3.Disk arrays
4.Tape libraries
5.Optical storage libraries


SAN interfaces


storage is connected to SAN servers through SAN interfaces


the most common SAN interface is SCSI,High-Performance Parallel Interface(HIPPI),BUS,Fibre channel Arbitrated loop(FC-aL),Enterprise systen connection(ESCON),and Fibre Connetcion(FICON).



A channel is a point to point connection between two communicating entities.




ROUTERS


fIbre channel routers are commonly known as storage routers,
storage routers are responsible for transferring stoarge data between networks by using different transmission media and addressing schemes.


storage routers use Fibre Channel Protocol to route the data instead of TCP/IP.


Switches


Fibre channel switches are used to interconnect a large number of devices.
A switch allows on-demand connections because it transmitts the signal only to that port to which the destination device is connected.


Switches help considerably inreducong network traffic.


And also help in the effective utilization of bandwidth and increase the 
aggregate throughput.