Storage area networks (SANs) continue to be the darling topology of the storage industry, where they are conceived as a commodity storage platform that can be scaled readily, managed centrally, and divided up in interesting ways to provide different "flavors" of storage -- different RAID levels, different access methods, etc. -- that are tailored to the needs of a diverse range of applications and end users. The latest evolution of the SAN paradigm envisions the use of TCP/IP networks to provide the underlying "plumbing" for the storage pool.