The Storage Area Network (SAN), with its promise of ubiquitous data access and reduced storage management costs, has captured the attention of IT managers and vendors alike. SANs are evolving to provide a flexible, scalable infrastructure for data storage that delivers any-to-any connectivity between host systems and storage devices. Visioneers hope to build on this robust infrastructure to deliver a storage utility that will simplify and automate the provisioning and maintenance of data storage resources. To support the deployment of SANs and to move the technology closer to its ""storage utility"" vision, standards-making efforts are moving forward on several fronts. Read about them in this white paper.