A Storage Area Network otherwise known as a SAN is a high speed network with a direct connection between different storage devices to servers and processors. Most (but not all) of the time the connection is through a Fibre Channel Switch. A SAN provides universal access to the enormous amount of information businesses are now creating. A SAN is separated into four main areas. The main areas include servers and storage devices, fabrics and connectivity, management, and exploitation and solutions.
SANs offer a simplified way to manage a company's information storage capacity. They are scalable, flexible, enhance systems performance, and data is consistently available. They also offer integrated, real-time backup and recovery. By offering real-time backup and recovery, it reduces risks of companies losing their business information. .
A SAN is similar yet different from a Local Area Network or LAN. In a LAN, each server requires its own dedicated storage. When a new server would be added, storage must also be added dedicated to that particular server. Storage is added as needed for each server even if an adjacent server has available storage capacity. That adjacent storage capacity then becomes wasted storage space. A SAN uses centralized storage. This is helpful when a single server goes down, it does not cut off the other servers access from any of the storage. It allows multiple servers to access the same data and helps eliminate redundancy. Data backup is done over storage channels with multiple server-to-storage paths eliminating the information bottleneck a LAN typically creates.
To explain a SAN to a person who does not know much about Information Technology, it could be described as a virtual pool. Each individual server backs up and saves its data. The data then goes into a "virtual pool" where the SAN itself distributes and sorts the data appropriately. The SAN files the data so the user does not have to do it themselves.