Providing service for geographically disparate fiber SANs ... Level3 ?

Mon Apr 26 03:19:58 UTC 2004

Learning a lot about SANs and will possibly need to
build one ... and am interested in the feasibility of
distributing a SAN across a wide geographical area.

Because of their wide private network and reasonable
costs, Level3 comes to mind ...

So the question is, if you need to build a fiber SAN
across several datacenters, do you have the ability to
have a real fiber connection between all of them, or
is it a virtual connection, where your fiber goes to
their routers, which goes to fiber between their
routers, etc., making several hops between each node
of your SAN ?

This seems "bad" to me, because a router problem
between the two nodes would essentially "break" the
SAN - much like breaking a hardware RAID array by
disconnecting a drive.

Comments ?  How are people, from the point of view of
the network, building fiber SANs, and what providers
(L3 ?) are they using ?

thanks.

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