NAS & SAN Explaination

[anthonymel]

I need someone to explain clearly the differences between NAS & SAN storage solutions for the LAN.

Here is what I know now, correct me if I'm wrong.

NAS is used mostly in small to medium sized business. It also connect directly to you network switch or hub. Inexpensive when compared to SAN

SAN is mostly mission critical and enterprise solution. It uses a sub network of servers attached to a SAN switch and mostly uses fibre channel connection to but the servers into an array.

Know if anyone could chime in with what's write and wrong here that would be great.

Thanks in advance,
Anthony

 

[bcastner]

Sort of.

NAS does not impose on my Server license; it essentially is a stand-alone file server device, likely UNIX/LINUX based. Because nearly all network clients can support SMB file sharing, this can work well and inexpensively. (Think of a huge USB pen drive for a network).

Any SAN solution is a managed one, and my servers are involved.

 

[Castor66]

Just to throw some more terms into the mix - there are also things called 'NAS heads' which are servers that act as NAS devices but are attached at the back-end to a SAN.

SAN - server attached, used in large-scale data environments and mission-critical areas. Pretty much essential for large-scale clusters. Specialist skills normally required depending on the size.

NAS - used for providing quick and easy file storage on a network. Generally simple to deploy and no specialist skills required.

 

[anthonymel]

Thanks for clearing this up. Is there any progress being made to make SAN deployment easier or cheaper?

Anthony

 

[bcastner]

There are fascinating changes in the density of disk drives. You can find 1 terabyte NAS drives now.

 

[Castor66]

Yup - size is becoming cheap. If you want to put together a DIY NAS you could make a 1TB SAN for about UKP1,000. With the introduction of 400GB SATA at about UKP200 NAS has never been so cheap.

 

[LloydSev]

We run NAS devices here from Iomega which comes with Windows Server 2003 Appliance Edition running on them.

Great for network storage.

We also have some older Maxtor NAS devices, 1 Win2k Server and Linux respectively.

I couldn't see doing business without some sort of network storage devices like them, however I've never worked with any SAN deployments either.

Computer/Network Technician
CCNA