SANs Solved the Data Sharing Problem

Chad Underwood
3 min readAug 2, 2022

SANs were created to solve data shares.

In the old days, a server would host its own storage. As tech has progressed, application reliability became as issue. When your data and application is on 1 server it becomes a problem fast. IT needed a way for the data to be shared among many servers.

And the SAN was born.

Photo by imgix on Unsplash

You wouldn’t have a SAN in your house, but you use them every day.

SANs are in data centers. Storage Area network (SAN) is a server or set of servers connected to provide shared storage. A SAN can contain thousands of host servers and storage devices.

Every company with an application uses a SAN.

Why they’re needed

SANs help a company’s storage resources be centralized, reliable, and flexible.

The flexibility for companies comes from being able to add more storage as needed without changing anything already setup. The reliability comes from application servers being able to access the same data no matter when it was last updated. Since the components of a SAN are connected the data ends up being centralized.

This is why a SAN is most important part of any company’s network.

Storage connected together

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Chad Underwood

American writer sharing experiences in life, writing, technology, and content creation.