What is a SAN?

• SAN (Storage Area Network) is designed to consolidate the disk space of servers on specially allocated disk storage. 

• The bottom line is that disk resources are used more economically, easier to manage and have greater performance. And in matters of virtualization and clustering, when several servers need access to the same disk space, such data storage systems are generally an indispensable thing.

• For SAN, the key parameters are not only performance, but also reliability. After all, if the database server loses the network for a couple of seconds — well, it will be unpleasant, but you can survive. And if the hard disk with the base or OS falls off at the same time, the effect will be much more serious. Therefore, all SAN components are usually duplicated — ports in storage devices and servers, switches, links between switches and, the key feature of SAN, compared to LAN, is duplication at the level of the entire infrastructure of network devices — factories.