NAS and SANs
...a business environment. The back-up was problem because when the administrator keeps adding storage devices, back-up is going to require more servers which drive up the overall cost and management sophistication of the backup. Another problem with the DAS was that when it was backing-up, it created great deal of overhead. With backups running on the network and users sharing the network at the same time, the network quickly became overloaded and drastically slows down. To overcome the problems with DAS, now we have two new methods of storing, which are NAS and SAN. If the business just needs simple file storage and still be cost effective, NAS was the way to go when compared to SAN. NAS directly connects to the network over the Ethernet port through a CAT 5 cable and is supported by TCP/IP protocol. Almost no changes have to be made when installing NAS in the current network which helps driving the cost down. Network Attached Storage is given a local IP address just like any other device in the network. The idea behind NAS is to have dedicated servers that have only one function, which is to serve files. Some advantages of using NAS in the network are that it is easier to understand and administer than SAN, almost any machine that can connect to the LAN can use protocols such as NFS, CIFS or HTTP protocol to connect to a NAS and share files, SANs uses Fibre Channel which is faster but still difficult to understand. The result is that a NAS-based network will be much easier to maintain. Some disadvantages of using NAS are that SAN has the better security system, which uses LUN security and NAS equipments run over existing network which has potential of latency and broadcast storms. When businesses choose to go with SAN as a way of network storage, the initial investment is going to be expensive. This is because of fiber cables, Fibre Channel Switches and host bus adaptors. SANs are just like second LAN which is just dedicated to connecting computers and storage devices together. SAN’s architecture makes all storage devices available to all systems on LANs and WANs. SAN uses different protocol than NAS which is Fibre Channel protocol and uses Fibre channel adapters to provide physical connection between disk arrays, servers and tape libraries. With SAN’s second LAN that allows all computers to communicate directly with all the disks and tape drives as i...