Over the past several years storage area networks (SANs) evolved to help corporations and service providers build and manage their explosive growth in storage capacity and complexity. With the arrival of Internet-based applications that are data-fed, data-driven, and data-intensive, many enterprises have experienced an annual doubling of storage capacity. The massive volume and mission-critical nature of these applications has placed tremendous pressure on IT departments to deploy SANs because of their promise of dynamic scalability, reduced management costs, and high availability.
