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Storage Area Network
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN). Although a SAN provides only block-level access, file systems built on top of SANs do provide file-level access and are known as shared-disk file systems. Newer SAN configurations enable hybrid SAN and allow traditional block storage that appears as local storage but also object storage for web services through APIs. Storage architectures Storage area networks (SANs) are sometimes referred to as ''network behind the servers'' and historically developed out of a centralized data storage model, but with its own data network. A SAN is, at its simp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Network
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies, based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies. The nodes of a computer network can include personal computers, servers, networking hardware, or other specialised or general-purpose hosts. They are identified by network addresses, and may have hostnames. Hostnames serve as memorable labels for the nodes, rarely changed after initial assignment. Network addresses serve for locating and identifying the nodes by communication protocols such as the Internet Protocol. Computer networks may be classified by many criteria, including the transmission medium used to carry signals, bandwidth, communications pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Just A Bunch Of Disks
The most widespread standard for configuring multiple hard disk drives is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks), which comes in a number of standard configurations and non-standard configurations. Non-RAID drive architectures also exist, and are referred to by acronyms with tongue-in-cheek similarity to RAID: * JBOD (derived from "just a bunch of disks"): described multiple hard disk drives operated as individual independent hard disk drives. * SPAN or BIG: A method of combining the free space on multiple hard disk drives from "JBoD" to create a spanned volume. Such a concatenation is sometimes also called BIG/SPAN. A SPAN or BIG is generally a spanned volume only, as it often contains mismatched types and sizes of hard disk drives. * MAID (derived from "massive array of idle drives"): an architecture using hundreds to thousands of hard disk drives for providing nearline storage of data, primarily designed for "Write Once, Read Occasionally" (WORO) applications, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motherboard
A motherboard (also called mainboard, main circuit board, mb, mboard, backplane board, base board, system board, logic board (only in Apple computers) or mobo) is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use. ''Motherboard'' means specifically a PCB with expansion capabilities. As the name suggests, this board is often referred to as the "mother" of all components attached to it, which often include peripherals, interface cards, and daughterboards: sound cards, video cards, network cards, host bus adapters, TV t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tape Libraries
In computer storage, a tape library, sometimes called a tape silo, tape robot or tape jukebox, is a storage device that contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges and an automated method for loading tapes (a robot). Additionally, the area where tapes that are NOT currently in a silo are stored is also called a tape library. Tape libraries can contain millions of tapes. One of the earliest examples was the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS), announced in 1974. Design These devices can store immense amounts of data, ranging from 20 terabytes up to 2.1 exabytes of data as of 2016. Such capacity is multiple thousand times that of a typical hard drive and well in excess of what is capable with network attached storage. Typical entry-level solutions cost around $10,000 USD, while high-end solutions can start at as much as $200,000 USD and cost well in excess of $1 million for a fully expanded and con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Host Adapter
In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA), connects a computer system bus, which acts as the host system, to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, Fibre Channel and SATA devices. Devices for connecting to IDE, Ethernet, FireWire, USB and other systems may also be called host adapters. Host adapters can be integrated in the motherboard or be on a separate expansion card. The term network interface controller (NIC) is more often used for devices connecting to computer networks, while the term converged network adapter can be applied when protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet allow storage and network functionality over the same physical connection. SCSI A SCSI host adapter connects a host system and a peripheral SCSI device or storage system. These adapters manage service and task communication between the host and target. Typically a device driver, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
InfiniBand
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology. By 2014, it was the most commonly used interconnect in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, until about 2016. Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia) manufactures InfiniBand host bus adapters and network switches, which are used by large computer system and database vendors in their product lines. As a computer cluster interconnect, IB competes with Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Intel Omni-Path. The technology is promoted by the InfiniBand Trade Association. History InfiniBand originated in 1999 from the merger of two competing designs: F ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ISCSI
Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI facilitates data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval. The protocol allows clients (called ''initiators'') to send SCSI commands ( ''CDBs'') to storage devices (''targets'') on remote servers. It is a storage area network (SAN) protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate storage into storage arrays while providing clients (such as database and web servers) with the illusion of locally attached SCSI disks. It mainly competes with Fibre Channel, but unlike traditional Fibre Channel which usually requires dedicated cabling, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data centers. Fibre Channel networks form a switched fabric because the switches in a network operate in unison as one big switch. Fibre Channel typically runs on optical fiber cables within and between data centers, but can also run on copper cabling. Supported data rates include 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128 gigabit per second resulting from improvements in successive technology generations. The industry now notates this as Gigabit Fibre Channel (GFC). There are various upper-level protocols for Fibre Channel, including two for block storage. Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is a protocol that transports SCSI commands over Fibre Channel networks. FICON is a protocol that transports ESCON commands, used by IBM mainframe computers, over Fibre Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethernet
Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses coaxial cable as a shared medium, while the newer Ethernet variants use twisted pair and fiber optic links in conjunction with switches. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have been increased from the original to the latest , with rates up to under development. The Ethernet standards include several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer. Systems communicating over Ethernet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. IP has the task of delivering packets from the source host to the destination host solely based on the IP addresses in the packet headers. For this purpose, IP defines packet structures that encapsulate the data to be delivered. It also defines addressing methods that are used to label the datagram with source and destination information. IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974, which was complemented by a connection-oriented service that became the basis for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet protocol suite is therefore often referred to as ''TCP/IP''. The first major version of IP, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), is the do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transmission Control Protocol
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP, which is part of the Transport Layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP. TCP is connection-oriented, and a connection between client and server is established before data can be sent. The server must be listening (passive open) for connection requests from clients before a connection is established. Three-way handshake (active open), retransmission, and error detection adds to reliability but lengthens latency. Applica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
