Has this ever happened to you?<FONT SIZE=2> Just as you reach a critical stage in your work, your computer slows to a crawl because the server is overburdened or, even worse, a "disk full" error shuts down applications before they can write their results to disk. Both problems are the result of poor resource provisioning, an issue of increasing importance as organizations field more and more servers and storage devices.</FONT>
In the late 1990s, hopes were riding high for a move to virtual interface architecture, or VIA, inside the computer server. Advocates touted VIA as the first significant change to basic computer design since John von Neumann conceived the first one more than 50 years ago.
Mike Linett, president of Zerowait, a Newark, Del.-based storage integrator, put the problem simply: "Our customers ... have been asking us for years why they can't have the best of both worlds: the simplicity of network-attached storage [NAS] and the scalability of storage area networks [SAN.]
