What About MAN, SAN, PAN, DAN, and CAN?

Future articles will describe the many other types of area networks in more detail. After LANs and WANs, one will most commonly encounter the following three network designs:

1. A Metropolitan Area Network connects an area larger than a LAN but smaller than a WAN, such as a city, with dedicated or high-performance hardware. 
2. A Storage Area Network connects servers to data storage devices through a technology like Fibre Channel. 
3. A System Area Network connects high-performance computers with high-speed connections in a cluster configuration.

Conclusion

To the uninitiated, LANs, WANs, and the other area network acronyms appear to be just more alphabet soup in a technology industry already drowning in terminology. The names of these networks are not nearly as important as the technologies used to construct them, however. A person can use the categorizations as a learning tool to better understand concepts like subnets, gateways, and routers.