Dell Research Report Sample

For the past 10 years or so, the data center has been in the phase of adopting central, shared storage architectures. Coming out of the mainframe era, the distributed computing model was for each department to purchase its own server, generally with disk onboard or direct attached. This was costly, due to low utilization, and difficult to manage, due to inconsistency. Storage area networks (SANs) emerged as a way to get storage out of the server, using a network infrastructure to connect servers to external shared storage devices. The network of choice for open systems servers during the period of SAN has predominantly been Fibre Channel.