Z-SAN

Z-SAN is a proprietary type of Storage area network licensed by Zetera corporation. Z-SAN hardware is bundled with a modified version of SAN-FS, which is a Shared disk file system driver and management software product made by [http://www.dataplow.com DataPlow] . The shared disk file system is what allows multiple computers to access the same volume at block level. The Z-SAN software license is purchased as part of the hardware package, where as the stand alone SAN-FS software (which works on iSCSI and FCP) is licensed by number of user seats.

The Z-SAN hardware is similar to the ATA over Ethernet hardware sold by Coraid and Lefthand Networks. Currently Zetera does not sell products directly, but instead licenses its technology to various other companies such as Netgear and Bell Microproducts. Like AoE, Z-SAN is intended to be a low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel and iSCSI. They do this by eliminating the need for the Host adapter and TCP Offload Engine hardware, as well as use standard Ethernet switches instead of the more expensive fibre channel switches.

AoE is mostly supported on Linux, Z-SAN is supported on Windows platforms. A Z-SAN can array many more disks than a standard RAID. The Zetera website claims that MIT has a Z-SAN array totaling 1.4 Petabytes of storage. The Disk arrays can be both striped and mirrored.

External links

*http://www.computerpoweruser.com/articles/archive/c0604/28c04/28c04.pdf Article about Z-SAN
*http://www.zetera.com/
*http://www.coraid.com/