Rather then debate SAN or NAS let's look at how they can be used to solve business issues in a complementary manner. While implementation and current capabilities differ, both SAN and NAS share common objectives, and any host system using more than 30 GB of storage is a candidate for SAN and NAS solutions and migration away from internal dedicated storage.
Ask any storage vendor to describe a suitable scenario for the deployment of a SAN and most will answer, "Data Warehousing." However, if handled across the production LAN, a SAN could negatively impact the performance of other applications that transact their business through the same fixed bandwidth.
SANs are the latest news in storage architectures as they provide a highly manageable, scalable and available infrastructure for corporate information, instantly delivering data storage resources to end users. SANs make it possible to share information and data on a level unprecedented to date and are becoming a major factor in the essential infrastructure to support the growing demands of e-commerce systems. Despite the increasing popularity of SANs, the question remains: What is the best way to build and manage a SAN?