Whether building a storage area network (SAN), network attached storage NAS or simply responding to unpredictable growth and change in storage needs, one wants to ease multi-vendor integration, reduce operational costs and simplify storage and server reconfiguration. The two business drivers of this are rationalization of resources and economies of scale. This white paper discusses how the right network architecture helps to centralize storage management while delivering unprecedented flexibility in matching storage resources to application requirements.(Dec. 2001)