Distributed storage networks

by Thomas C. Jepsen

The worldwide market for SAN and NAS storage is anticipated to grow from US $2 billion in 1999 to over $25 billion by 2004. As business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-commerce matures, even greater demands for management of stored data will arise. With the rapid increase in data storage requirements in the last decade, efficient management of stored data becomes a necessity for the enterprise. A recent UC-Berkeley study predicts that 150,000 terabytes of disk storage will be shipped in 2003. Most financial, insurance, healthcare, and telecommunications institutions are in the process of implementing storage networks that are distributed to some degree. For these institutions, data integrity is critical, and they will spend much time and money on planning. One of the primary obstacles to implementing a storage network cited by enterprise IT managers is a lack of knowledge about storage networking technology and the specific issues involved in extending a Storage Area Network (SA