A very user-friendly and surprisingly detailed (at times) overview of storage area networking. The basics of the fiber channel protocol and network elements were covered, providing the reader with a firm, yet easy-to-digest foundation in SAN. Other applications, such as disaster recovery, fault tolerance, requirements gathering and analysis, clustering, and backups were also discussed. The book definitely packed a lot of information in a very small space (~170 pages of text).

The greatest weakness of the version that I read (4th printing in 1999), presumably the latest available, was that it focused heavily on arbitrated loop design, and not so much on next generation switch fabrics. The complex arbitrated loop applications that it used as examples have been made obsolete by much simpler, feature-rich fabric switched solutions. And ultra-scalable (cascaded switched fabric) networks were almost entirely ignored. An update on this book is desperately needed, or else it runs the risk of being a history text more than the introductory and quick-reference manual it was intended to be.