ABSTRACT
One of the new buzzwords in the storage industry is “converged Network attached storage (NAS) and Server area network (SAN).” There are situations where this makes good financial sense, but there are other situations where this is a waste of money. NAS stands for network attached storage, also known as file storage. Both NAS and SAN have disks and controllers. Both NAS and SAN require administration: capacity management/provisioning, backup/restore, performance monitoring, and balancing/zoning of SAN and network traffic. SAN stands for storage area network, also known as block storage. The storage network presents devices to the server. SAN is great for applications designed for multiple simultaneous users, such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, and similar applications. Consolidated NAS and SAN has solid Return on Investment in bigger shops, with a heavier storage administration load, lots of storage, frequently repurposed storage.
