what will be used by san to provide connectivity between hosts and storage
Storage virtualization Appliance based devices are dedicated hardware devices that provide SAN connectivity of one form or another. These sit between the hosts and storage and in the case of in-band (symmetric) appliances can provide all of the benefits and services discussed in this article. I/O requests are targeted at the appliance itself, which performs the meta-data mapping before redirecting the I/O by sending its own I/O request to the underlying storage. The in-band appliance can also provide caching of data, and most implementations provide some form of clustering of individual appliances to maintain an atomic view of the metadata as well as cache data.