Enterprise storage provides the foundation and functionality for an EnterpriseStorage Network. In order to leverage the value of that foundation across the entire organization, access to that information infrastructure must be provided that reaches across the enterprise. Storage networking offers two technologies to address this evolving connectivity need: Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS).
Storage Area Networks
SANs today extend the point to point SCSI protocol used to connect host servers to their storage arrays into a network architecture by encapsulating it into the fibre channel protocol that supports a many to many topology. In addition to enabling storage and hosts to be networked together, fibre channel also provides a distance (10km) and speed (100MB) improvement over SCSI.