As Good A Place As Any

Papers on the Fundamentals of Storage Area Networks (Fibre Channel & IP Based)

About four years ago, when I was in a different role at Sun, I wrote a document called the Sun SAN Cookbook which gathered together all the obscure configuration rules for Sun Storage in a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network. Every storage array had a different set of rules in those days: it was something of a minefield!! Over time the SAN connectivity characteristics of Sun's storage arrays came into some kind of alignment and that part of the document became less important..and eventually went away all together; what remained was a general guide to Fibre Channel SANs and that is now published as an article on BigAdmin called SAN Fundamentals: How Fibre Channel SANs Are Built, Secured and Managed. It is worth reading if you are trying to understand how Fibre Channel SANs work.

About a 18 months ago I looked into IP SANs and iSCSI. The resulting document is also now on BigAdmin and is called IP SAN Fundamentals: An Introduction to IP SANs and iSCSI. It provides the reader with useful background information on the fast moving world of IP SANs and iSCSI.

I don't do SAN stuff no more, so these papers will stay as is, but the technology does not stand still: Solaris 10 8/07 (AKA Solaris 10 Update 4) just came out and includes a Solaris iSCSI Target; if you combine that with the Sun Fire X4500 and Solaris ZFS you start to see some very interesting possibilites!

Posted at 08:25AM Sep 08, 2007 in Sun  |