It seems that the slogan for a popular workstation manufacturer, “The Network is the Computer” is getting closer as more and more companies are taking advantage of storage area networks, or SANs.SANs increase available bandwidth and thus eliminate network transaction slowdown during backups, while improving overall performance. SANs work via a set of linked, dedicated storage devices that use the fiber channel storage interface. Although SANs are key for   companies that transmit data 24 hours a day, experts say the trend is attracting users in all industries.The Gartner Group says more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies will employ a SAN by 2001. International Data’s Robert Gray expects fiber channel storage expenses for SANs to triple in 1999, from about $560 million last year. Fiber channel storage arrays will be a $9.2 billion business by 2002, IDC predicts, while users will divert an additional $2 billion to $3 billion for SANs using other interfaces.Experts say SANs evolved from the need to transmit increasingly larger data files. The technology supports transmission rates up to 100 MBps over distances as great as 10 kilometers, and can comprise numerous storage systems including RAID, tape backup, CD-ROM    libraries, or a group of magnetic disks that are linked to one or more servers via fiber channel.