When one looks at the main benefits of a SAN people often cite performance. But performance means many things to many people in the IT world. This document identifies just what aspects of performance are or are not critical to the successful deployment of these storage network technologies.

We will show what is and is not important as a focus item and look at the systems and storage involved in levying information flow requirements versus the storage network infrastructure itself. We'll examine the best place to invest for performance and dispel some performance myths at the same time. Finally, we will focus on the network itself as opposed to the server and storage portions of the information flow path.