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In a storage area network (SAN), multiple servers are attached to ports on the front-end of a director, and a number of storage devices, disk and tape, are attached to ports on the back end. It makes sense to keep all servers from seeing all devices.
There are three popular reasons why companies choose to zone their SANs: to prevent problems due to multiple servers with different operating systems trying to access and initialize the same devices, to limit access to sensitive data, and to increase performance.
Hard zoning maps devices physically to a port, and soft zoning maps them logically. If you use the world-wide name (WWN) of the device for zone definition, you are using soft zoning. If you use the physical port number, you are using hard zoning.
Hard zoning provides a stricter level of access prevention to the devices. Soft zoning is much more flexible and easier to implement -- especially in very large, complex SANs. Though soft-zoned ports are hidden from servers outside the zone, the possibility still exists to access the zone if the right information is provided. The probability of this is extremely low and often does not outweigh the benefits of soft zoning. If your storage area network is not as large and complex, or a company has the resources available, hard zoning provides greater security. Because both hard and soft zoning are widely practiced, and other security measures are commonly used, the argument that one is better than the other is more theoretical than practical.
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