San Vs NAS - a sturdy decision to make

Among all these myriad decisions, which need to be accessed, the implementation of a SAN or a NAS infrastructure stands critical and is above all. Transmission protocols and virtualization technology are the major factors, which are influencing the usage of a SAN or a NAS and thus make their implementation critical for a business.

It is a fact that, at a first glimpse, NAS and SAN seem to be identical or rather same in the given environment. The common factor which bonds them is the implementation of RAID technology in both of them. But that doesn’t make them overlapped, is they are certain basic differences which impact their individualistic technology survivals.

The main difference is in their protocols where TCP/IP is used by Network attached storage along with NFS, CIFS and HTTP protocols as well, while, the Storage area network uses the basic iSCSI protocol. To list out more, here they are

Network attached storage (NAS)- Almost all the systems, which are networked to a LAN can use the NFS, CIFS or HTTP protocols, in order to connect to a NAS and share the files and the data.

• File level data storage is connected directly to network and offers flexibility to perform maintenance without shutdown.

• The data is recognized by a NAS by the file name and the byte offsets and then it transfers the file data or Meta data of the file, in a secure way through user identification and file locking feature.

• Sharing of information is possible among disparate operating systems such as UNIX and NT.

• File systems are managed by NAS head units and have back up and mirroring feature support through software, deployed on the NAS hardware.

More Information about IP SAN

Storage area network- in this storage, only the devices with Small computer system interface Fibre channel can connect to the network of SAN and that too with a limit of only 6 miles approximately.

• Servers can access data stored on networked devices and that too in a contiguous way and with full access to particular set of application users.

• Large enterprises, where terabytes of data need to be stored or transferred, the deployment of NAS structure becomes skeptic, due to management hiccups. In such cases SAN comes into existence.

• In this SAN environment, the data is addressed by disk block numbers and it transfers data to raw disk blocks.

• File sharing depends on the operating systems and cannot support disparate OSes.

• Block by block copy is employed for backups and mirrors, even though if the blocks are empty.

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