System Network Architecture

System Network Architecture or more commonly known as SAN is considered a legacy by many people who operate in the network field. SNA was introduced by the IBM and is an IBM’s proprietary networking architecture and it was created in the year 1974. It is the complete protocol stack for the interconnecting computers and their resources; therefore, even after being called a legacy, many organizations are still using it. The main thing to know about SAN is that it describes the protocol, however, it itself is not a protocol or any other program. In the start the SNA was used by the IBM’s mainframe computers, however, over the time the SNA evolved a lot and today it is also used to support the peer to peer networks of workstations.

The SNA has several advantages and disadvantage attached to it. Some of which are discussed in the following material.

The first advantage of SNA was that, the localization of the problems in the telecommunication networks became quite easier, because very small software was used to deal with the communications links. The second advantage of this SNA is that, with this technology it became quite an easier job to add communication capability to an application program that was already being used in the network. These were the advantages of SNA.

The disadvantages of SNA are that when an organization used an SNA network then they found it difficult to connect to a non-SNA network. The second problem or disadvantage was that a number of alternative pathways had to be stored andpredesigned centrally to ensure that if a pathway was blocked then the data can go through alternative pathway. The third disadvantage was that the maintenance and installment of the SNA is complicated and the SNA products available in the market are expensive.