8.1. IP Storage

IP storage refers to a group of technologies that provide block-level access between storage devices or servers using the IP family of protocols as a transport mechanism. The astute reader would argue, and rightly so, that data access over IP networks has been in use for quite some time—for example, in applications accessing data from a server using the CIFS or NFS protocol. The difference is that the applications are file oriented and the translation from file-level I/O to block-level I/O happens at the NAS device or server, after the request has made its way across a network. With IP SANs, the requests and responses traveling across a network consist of block-level I/O and not file-level I/O.

Figure 8.1 shows the basic outlines ...

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