Server clustering is a “meta-application”: Clustering can provide increased reliability, scalability, and performance for nearly any application. Clustering and SANs go hand-in-hand because clusters require that multiple servers access the same storage resources. Clustering was one of the first applications for SANs.
Server clusters offer benefits to SANs: High availability due to elimination of single point of failure, failover/fallback capability Enhance performance by eliminating bottlenecks Load balance across multiple data paths Reduce latency by sharing bandwidth between servers and storage Flexible allocation of host and storage resources Independent scaling of application, server, or storage resources