Enterprise level storage is these days one the most important concerns in the software industries or for that matter any IT related or IT dependent industries. Every single day significant amounts of important data or information are produced which is necessary to be saved for further references. We can take the example of any bank; everyday millions of transactions happen all over the world and the banks have to store each and every detail of all those transactions.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) are two of the hottest storage technologies now-a-days. NAS technology involves elements such as file server and storage device, in the network, combining to form a NAS element. NAS elements do not perform any function except file sharing, and file access is done through remote protocols like NFS or CIFS. On the other hand, SAN utilizes Fibre Channels rather than Ethernet as its underlying transport medium. One important thing about SAN is that it externalizes the storage devices i.e. the storage devices are not directly connected to the LAN (unlike NAS), but is connected to the servers through switches or bridges. It significantly decreases the traffic load on the local area network.
Comparison
NAS
• Any machine that is connected to the LAN can use NFS or CIFS protocols to share files in NAS.
• Since storage devices are directly connected to the LAN it increases congestion and traffic in the network.
• NAS allows data sharing between disparate operating systems like Windows and Linux.
• Capacity of large NAS devices just below a few terabytes of data. Extending the network and hence the storage capacity is a little complicated but it’s cheaper than SAN implementation.
SAN
• Only server class machines with SCSI or Fibre Channel can connect to a SAN.
• The storage devices are connected to the servers through the Fibre Channel and do not interfere with traffic in the local network.
• In SAN file sharing is OS dependant and some of them are not even supported.
• Capacity of SAN devices is hundreds of terabytes of data and it is easily scalable unlike NAS, but it’s quite expensive.
These days with the rapid growth of technology and new products on network storage coming into the market on an everyday basis, the actual difference between SAN and NAS has become very blurry. Today sometimes SAN uses Ethernet and sometimes NAS uses Fibre Channels. Only difference which is left is the choice of network protocol to be used. SAN systems transfer files over the network through disk blocks whereas NAS deals with the whole file, its metadata, user authentication and permissions etc.
Further Reading
• Using Storage Area Networks (Que Publishing)
• Using SANs and NAS by W. Curtis Preston (O’Reilly)
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Tags: Ethernet, Fibre Channel, RAID, SCSI, Storage
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