Companies investing in Fiber Channel SAN infrastructure have realized significant benefits in increased storage utilization and availability, simplified management, and more effective disaster recovery and business continuance strategies. Until now, however, SAN deployment and its resulting benefits have primarily been focused on mission-critical application islands within individual data centers. The difficulty and cost associated with migrating the large number of data center midrange servers to Fiber Channel in certain cases has made it impractical for IT managers to extend the benefits of SAN to mid-range applications. Using open-standard IP-based technology, the Cisco MDS 9000 family IP storage services module eliminates the barriers to SAN expansion, enabling businesses to extend the reach of their Fiber Channel SANs throughout the data center and between data centers. The dual functionality of the Cisco MDS 9000 family IP storage services module supports interconnection of remote SAN islands and extends SAN connectivity to IP-enabled servers using the FCIP and iSCSI protocols, respectively.