Abstract

Today’s strategic business initiatives are inexorably linked to network bandwidth for storage applications; simply put, a business can only grow as fast as information can be retrieved, exchanged, and acted upon. A recent University of California study,¹ having estimated that the entire human race has accumulated about one exabyte (10¹⁸) of information to date, goes on to predict that the second exabyte will be generated within the next 3 years. It’s been estimated that by 2003, the Fortune 1000 companies will add over 150 terabytes of storage capacity, and over half of all fiber optic traffic in their data centers will be feeding storage systems. Storage services are growing at over 120% per year, and are projected to be an $8 Billion market in 2003. Loss or even temporary unavailability of mission critical data is unacceptable; in the event of a disaster at their primary data center, large companies can easily lose millions of dollars. In this environment, storage area networks (SANs) have become a vital part of the e-business infrastructure.

© 2002 Optical Society of America