World Wide Name (WWN)

What Does World Wide Name (WWN) Mean?

A World Wide Name (WWN) is a unique identifier assigned by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to the manufacturers of network storage products. A manufacturer must include a WWN with all network storage devices.

WWN is also known as World Wide Identifier (WWID).

Techopedia Explains World Wide Name (WWN)

A WWN is a number that is hard-coded into network storage devices, such as fiber channels and advanced technology attachments (ATA). To simplify, a WWN is like a MAC address but for network storage devices.

A WWN is primarily implemented in SANs with multiple attached storage devices, which helps system administrators (SA) uniquely categorize and identify storage segments.