Investing in architecting a storage area network (SAN) today can not only solve storage consolidation issues, improvements in backup and recovery or high performance data access, it can facilitate day-to-day support and maintenance in the data center. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. Investing in a discovery process of both your current needs and future expansion requirements will save lots of headaches and could save costly upgrades in the future. This paper examines the strategies in building a SAN architecture with considerations on fabric allocation, software needs and troubleshooting. (2001)