RE: system p announcement

From: Walden H. Leverich

While you can run blades w/out a SAN (not talking i5 blades here), the
real benefit of blades comes when you do have a SAN. You've separated
the compute engine from the storage engine and you're free to
manage/upgrade/maintain them independently. Yes, I agree the i5 blade
will likely require a SAN, but I see that as a good thing, not a bad
thing.

Not that you would specifically know, Walden, but this seems like a good
place to ask one of my uber-newbie questions. Since IBM storage works on
single-level store and other systems don't, does it work and play well with
other on a SAN?

I know virtually nothing about SANs, so I don't know how you allocate chunks
of storage to a specific server, nor how the SAN converts the internal
addressing scheme of the server to the SAN location. I'm still a little
fuzzy on how these things work together; can you put, for example, System i
storage and Windows storage in the same recovery set on the SAN? If not, if
the System i storage is an isolated set of disks, then what's the advantage
of the SAN?

Really, just asking. I'm clueless in this area. I've never needed a SAN in
my own operations, although I suppose a NAS device is my first step in that
direction.

Joe