Storage Area Networking

Introduction

In the modern enterprise network, computing systems have become such an integral part of the organization that when they are unavailable, companies can lose revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and possibly data or decision-making capabilities. As a result, these computing systems must be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

Choosing the proper storage format is a critical part of achieving constant data availability.

This module will discuss the three ways to connect storage devices:

DAS - Direct Attached Storage
NAS - Network Attached Storage
SAN - Storage Area Network

This graphic shows a generic representation of DAS, NAS, and SAN implementations

Objectives

Define distributed storage and describe its benefits and limitations
Describe consolidated storage
Describe the benefits of SAN over the other two storage formats