Conclusion
Many companies and organizations will evolve towards SAN technology without realizing it as new disk arrays, offline storage devices, servers and software that are all made fiber and SAN attachable. Some other organizations will adopt SAN aggressively or insistently to gain the potential benefits of far better utilization of resources, new level of availability, performance and the ability to better share corporate data across their organization. For 'pioneers' that adopt Storage Area Network, they must select proven or trusted suppliers with a pedigree or good reputation for producing reliable hardware or software. These 'pioneers' also must advance aggressively to gain benefits of a SAN but with more proper planning. Management tools and utilities should be distributed early to help control the SAN.
Many experts say that SAN will take several years to established during which many users will see these 'pioneers' work through an evolution from 'SCSI-based' to an environment with great availability and performance for global applications and globally shared data. Nevertheless, the key to success is the establishment of a 'storage-centric' environment supported by a high performance low latency fiber fabric that provides users with highly available access to clusters of application servers with many-to-many connectivity to shared online and offline storage.