An overview of symmetrical and asymmetrical pooling

The Fibre Channel SAN consists of hardware components such as storage subsystems, storage devices and servers that are attached to the SAN via interconnect entities (host-bus adapters, bridges, hubs, switches). Another hardware element being deployed in SANs is commonly referred to as a SAN appliance or SAN server. These SAN appliances are computing elements attached directly to the SAN or installed in the storage data path. These SAN appliances are responsible for managing the Fibre Channel topology and additionally providing an abstraction of storage. The two most common SAN appliance implementations are called asymmetrical pooling or Metadata Server and symmetrical pooling or SAN Storage Manager. This white paper examines the symmetrical pooling and asymmetrical pooling approaches to SAN management and describes their advantages and concerns. (March 15, 2001)
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