1. A system for managing a plurality of storage area networks including a plurality of data storage volumes and one or more hosts, the system comprising: a control path controller including a virtualization application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and having a storage and switch controller and at least one microprocessor embedded on it; and a disk for storing meta-data related to the plurality of data storage volumes such that the one or more data storage networks are managed by the control path processor using the meta-data and by the ASIC controlling one or more switches between the one or more data storage networks; wherein the virtualization ASIC supports virtual Storage Area Networks (SAN)s by parsing between the front-end SANs and back-end SANs regardless of physical configuration of the SANs, to enable mapping from virtual volumes to back-end storage elements across virtual SANs.