SAN

Abbreviation with 2 meanings

SAN
Stands forSan Diego International Airport
Meanings2
CategoriesTransportation & Travel, Technology & Computing

SAN has two meanings. It stands for San Diego International Airport (airport code) or Storage area network (networking).

Meanings of SAN at a glance

#SAN stands forContext
1San Diego International AirportTransportation & Travel › Airport Code
2Storage area networkTechnology & Computing › Networking

1. San Diego International Airport

Transportation & Travel · Airport Code Abbreviations

Close-in airport just 3 miles from downtown San Diego on the bay, and one of the busiest single-runway commercial airports in the world. Arriving jets pass low over downtown high-rises on final approach.

Example: Landing at SAN, you look straight into office windows on the approach over downtown.

ICAO code KSAN. Long known as Lindbergh Field, honoring Charles Lindbergh, whose Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego by Ryan Airlines in 1927. Tight space means the airport cannot add a second full runway, so growth has focused on replacing the aging Terminal 1. Nearby Tijuana's airport is reachable through the Cross Border Xpress bridge.

2. Storage area network

Technology & Computing · Networking Abbreviations

A dedicated high-speed network that gives servers block-level access to shared disk arrays, so remote storage appears to each server as a locally attached drive. SANs traditionally use Fibre Channel, while iSCSI carries the same idea over ordinary Ethernet.

Example: The database cluster boots from LUNs on the SAN rather than from local disks.

Often confused with NAS (network-attached storage), which shares files over SMB or NFS rather than raw blocks; the reversed letters add to the confusion. SANs underpin enterprise virtualization because virtual machines can move between hosts while their disks stay on shared storage. Hyper-converged infrastructure and cloud block storage have reduced demand for dedicated SAN hardware.

More airport code abbreviations

  • RDU – Raleigh-Durham International Airport
  • RNO – Reno-Tahoe International Airport
  • RSW – Southwest Florida International Airport
  • RUH – King Khalid International Airport
  • SAT – San Antonio International Airport
  • SAW – Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport
  • SCL – Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport
  • SDF – Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport

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More networking abbreviations

  • RFC – Request for Comments
  • RIP – Routing Information Protocol
  • RIR – Regional internet registry
  • RTT – Round-trip time
  • SD-WAN – Software-defined wide area network
  • SDN – Software-defined networking
  • SFTP – SSH File Transfer Protocol
  • SMB – Server Message Block

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