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?
As companies continue to generate vast quantities of data, they must have compact, inexpensive ways to store the information they need to do business. Efficiency and cost control are at the heart of virtual tape technology. Recent software-based, hardware-independent advances in virtual tape technology enable storage managers to create a virtual tape environment from any combination of OS/390 disk and tape hardware - including resources the organization already owns.
How can you keep day-to-day storage usage from propelling a server so it doesn’t reach its capacity and crash? How about proposing a corporate or IT storage policy and using storage resource management (SRM) tools to help carry it out.
Universities and higher education institutions are facing a boom in electronic data storage and backup needs. The national upsurge in Internet-based research and the increasing popularity of data-intensive studies are causing stressed-out systems admin personnel to frantically search for terabytes of storage space. Additionally, "mission-critical" data, such as administrative, personnel and student records are now recorded electronically, emphasizing the importance of an expandable, rock-solid-reliable backup system.
The explosion of the e-business revolution is driving an unprecedented demand for storage. Of course, as demand rises, technological innovation follows. As technological innovation accelerates, user confusion over the number of products and technologies available increases as well. The storage market is no exception to this rule and has given rise to new, and commonly confused, storage topologies: NAS and SAN. So what's the difference?
The explosive growth of e-business and e-commerce is triggering new and serious issues for system administrators in the areas of data storage and file transfer management. Offline and nearline are the traditional data backup and storage methods, but each has major drawbacks and limitations.
Information has become the new world currency. Information-intensive requirements are raising a growing chorus of demands for more storage and more bandwidth. Organizations are racing to provide fast, reliable, continuously available information access, while struggling to accommodate the growing volumes of bulk data and these pressures are driving organizations to adopt Storage Area Networks.