Carlson Shared Services is the IT division of Carlson Companies that provides centralized IT services and support. It uses a mainframe computer and over 50 servers located in a central computing environment to run applications like Oracle, email, Microsoft Exchange, and a data warehouse. Implementing a storage area network (SAN) could enhance application performance for Carlson Shared Services. A SAN provides shared storage that is independent of applications and easily accessible. It allows for storage to be added without interrupting operations. A well-configured SAN with mirroring and redundant servers can improve uptime. Fibre Channel switching enables easy setup of private connections between SANs for backups and data sharing.