Tom Clark
1 Understand technology behind without reading T11 standards
This book is quite dry, no question about that, but not as dry as the standards published by organizations in charge with Fibre Channel standards. Yet, as a SAN designer or SAN administrator you can find in it all the information you need to understand the inner details of a Loop Insertion Primitive or how an Alternate buffer-to-buffer credit model works. Compared with other books on the subject is remarcably error free and I was nicely impressed by Mr. Clark's considerations upon what should be the customer' role in steering vendors in developing products that are more open and interoperate better.
2 Very detailed description of SAN technology
This was a very good overview of the many varied components and technologies that make up a storage area network. It goes into a lot of detail about things like standards, protocols, speeds, etc. If you want to understand the differences between iSCSI and FCIP, for example, this is the book for you. The word "Reference" in the subtitle is accurate. It's not a guide on how to administer a SAN day-to-day in the real-world; it's about the concepts and details of what a SAN really is. The writing style is a little dry, but I didn't expect it to be a page-turner. My only disappointment was when I realized that over 1/4 of the book is devoted to appendices, glossary and index instead of written content.
