Tandem comments:.

Both System Area Network and Storage Area Network initiatives are not mutually exclusive and in fact are largely complementary, in that both are attempting to drive industry-standards into business-critical enterprise computing. Currently, the initiatives are focusing on different areas, with System Area Networks addressing server-to-server communication standards (IPC) and Storage Area Networks describing server-to-storage communication standards. We envision that in the future these initiatives will converge and instead of differentiating on IPC vs. storage will complement each other by System Area Networks and Storage Area Networks defining the low-level infrastructure and high-level operation standards respectively for a common distributed enterprise com puting paradigm. At that time, one SAN term to refer to both initiatives may be most appropriate.