If you're about to manage a Storage Area Network on a day-to-day basis, you'll want Cisco Press' Storage Area Network Fundamentals, a book that covers everything from hardware warning lights to the structure of the Internet.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [December 27, 2002]

The book we covered in our previous SAN book review, IP SANs: A Guide to iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP Protocols for Storage Area Networks, focused on SAN protocols, the virtual nuts and bolts of building SAN networks, and was less concerned with the hardware of storage networking.

Cisco Press' Storage Area Network Fundamentals: A guide to planning, implementing, managing, and using storage area networks to increase the efficiency of your network infrastructure, starts by summarizing the theoretical structure of the Internet in a single chapter. It's a completely different kind of SAN book. Targeted at a specific audience, the people who design, implement, and roll out the networks at service providers and large enterprises, the book is concerned primarily with the physical nuts and bolts of Storage Area Networks.

The author, Meeta Gupta, is an educator as well as a networking expert, and her book is filled with details about specific types and items of equipment. Connectors, warning lights, and other physical details are thoroughly described, and this information should be especially useful to anyone who directly builds or manages a SAN.

After an overview of the Internet and other networking concepts in Chapter 1, Gupta writes about SAN basics in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 covers Fibre Channel protocols. Chapter 4 is devoted to Fibre Channel hardware, with a separate chapter, Chapter 5, covering Fibre Channel Cabling. Chapters 6 and 7 teach basic and advanced SAN networking concepts. Chapter 8, on SAN security, is a must-read, providing simple and complex warnings for readers of all technical levels. Chapter 9 describes potential SAN problems and offers troubleshooting tips. Chapters 11 and 12 cover the future of storage networking, which includes long distance optical networks, IP SANs, new protocols such as InfiniBand, and, of course, a potential future ISP business: Storage Service Providers (SSPs).

Although it is filled with detailed technical information, the book also covers the basics that anyone on the job should know. If you do already know, for example, the structure of the Internet, you may find the book's description useful in budget-related conversations with upper management.

The book covers a great deal of ground, and every sentence provides useful information. Although this is good because it means that the book is no longer than it needs to be, it means that readers must pay careful attention. If, for example, you're trying to persuade the finance department to spend money on new iSCSI technology, you'll go back and reread the iSCSI section and find that the book says that one of the benefits of iSCSI is that it can be adopted gradually without writing off existing equipment. However, the book only says this once. As with all printed material, some of the technology will have changed by the time the book reaches your hands. This does not make the book less valuable.

Because it covers so much ground, the book cannot cover any one subject completely. Gupta has filled it with useful, authoritative references for further reading, many of them URLs, for readers who need to know more about a specific subject such as, say, InfiniBand. The book also has a useful glossary, and two appendixes. One appendix lists most of the vendors in the Fibre Channel space, and the other is a handy reference describing RAID levels 0 through 5 in detail.

If your job will involve working on a Storage Area Network on a daily basis, consider you should definitely look at this book.

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