Storage Area Networking

Consolidated Storage

To address the challenges with distributed storage models, the industry has developed products that allow for storage consolidation. Storage consolidation creates a paradigm shift for the traditional storage deployments that are characteristic of mainframe and UNIX® environments today.

Storage consolidation consists of centralizing storage devices in a common external system that is accessible by multiple servers. Storage consolidation can be deployed either as Network Attached Storage (NAS) or in Storage Area Networks (SANs).

Network Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances offer a simple and economical way to quickly add storage. They connect directly to the network - not to a file server. NAS servers have been streamlined by eliminating unneeded components. They also run a highly optimized operating system that typically has built in support for multiple networking protocols.
NAS appliances are best suited for heterogeneous or mixed environments. Users cannot distinguish between accessing files on a server or on a NAS appliance.

Storage Area Network

A SAN is a high-speed sub-network of shared storage units. Traditionally, servers have formed the back end of a business, and a data network has been built "in front of" the servers to allow client access to locally attached storage. A SAN is a network built "behind" the servers that allows them to access and share storage devices. The server merely acts as a pathway between the client computers and the storage devices.
Since data in a SAN is not stored locally on the server itself, server power is freed for other business applications. Network bandwidth is also better utilized in a SAN, since data management is now conducted off the corporate LAN.