Storage Area Networks Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Storage Area Networks - Essay Example The end of this millennium saw the arrival of some of the most extensive network storage management technologies, NAS, SAN and others. A precursor of SAN, Network Attached Storage (NAS) is the term assigned to file servers, comprising one or more internal servers, preconfigured disk capacity with a specialized operating system for storage management. NAS servers become part of the network through traditional LAN configurations, allowing storage capabilities as file servers. In terms of applicability, NAS servers have been designed to fit the needs of hosting data for web applications (Troppens). Since this storage technology has been developed specifically to assist in the sharing of files over networks, NAS provides the following advantages of its predecessors: 1. NAS functions using tailor-made or stripped-down version of the operating system suited to fit the needs of managing storage over networks. ... As compared to storage technologies existent before NAS, it provides functions as snapshots, remote mirroring and backup over Fiber Channel SAN. 3. NAS servers allows for easy-to-use PnP (Troppens) file systems, allowing for greater optimization through removal of all functions not required in file serving, increasing storage capabilities in addition to low installation and maintenance costs. 4. NAS servers are easily scalable to suit the needs of an expanding organization A mere shortfall in NAS is its use of conventional network file systems such as NFS (Troppens) or CIFS in coordination with Internet protocols such as FTP or HTTP. This in turn limits the basic premise of file sharing paradigm, providing powerful performance against I/O intensive application requests. Successor to NAS - Storage Area Networks By definition, a SAN (or Storage Area Network) is "a specialized, high-speed network attaching servers and storage devices" (Tate). This new storage networking technology is so flexible that it eliminates the need for a dedicated connection between a server and a storage device, as well as the "concept that the server effectively owns and manages the storage devices". (Bird) SAN is preferred to a very large extent over other network storage capabilities due to a variety of factors; firstly, almost all traditional methods of handling high level of storage, accessibility and availability of sensitive and operational data have failed in wake of increasing requirements for fast and efficient transfers. Secondly, in comparison to a client / server model that supports server-centric data management operations, SAN facilitates the organization with a data-centric model making it possible to transfer large amounts of data without being dependent of the server. It