Click to enlargeNowadays two technologies are used as enterprise data storage solutions – NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network). Despite the general resemblance, these technologies represent different functionality and help accomplish different tasks.
NAS is practically an array of hard disc drives with network interface. Volumes of HDD NAS are treated by network users as shared network resources. Access to NAS-stored data is provided at the file-level. Accordingly, access permissions for network users are set in the same way as for other shared network resources. In other words, NAS is an advanced file-server that supports multiple network file systems and additional services. Usually, NAS operates on the Ethernet networks using TCP/IP.
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Click to enlargeThe combination of Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices and RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) offers a number of advantages to businesses or organizations of just about any size. NAS devices serve to function as a dedicated server used to manage an array of disks in a network and operating-system agnostic manner – any user with an IP address can seamlessly access the NAS from a location on the network. RAID has been used for users in a number of popular configurations to handle striping and data replication across an array of hard drives. It is becoming increasingly popular, therefore, for organizations to configure their NAS storage systems in one of the RAID configurations to protect against data loss in the event of a failure. Disk storage for the most part has become increasingly reliable over the years but in any environment that consists of multiple (even dozens) of attached disk devices, you can be certain that some will fail on occasion. Read the rest of this entry »
Click to enlargeSmall businesses operating in today’s hyper-competitive business environment cannot be faulted for being highly selective when implementing new technologies or infrastructure into their computing environment. Larger businesses and organizations have the reality of scale and of a business reliance on truly mission-critical systems to help drive the push for continuing investment and optimization of information technologies in their environment. Small businesses, however, must remain in much more of a perpetual “show-me” mode, in order to ensure that they are burnt by a sudden change in technology vendors or implementations. At the same time, data is rapidly becoming the lifeblood of even the smallest of businesses, particularly those doing sizeable business on the Internet, through the acquisition of contact lists, customer databases, e-commerce sales, or internal application data. Consequently, it is important the data used in all these scenarios is protected and available in a cost-effective fashion. Large corporations rely on extremely large-scale storage area networks (SANs) for managing massive data storage capacity and data access performance requirements but these capabilities come at a very high cost – a cost that is out of reach for nearly all small businesses. Enter network attached storage (NAS), which offers some of the benefits of SANs at a fraction of the cost for small businesses.
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Click to enlargeNetwork-attached storage (NAS) is an increasingly popular storage option for a wide range of uses. Whether it be for a home, small office, home office, or large business environment, NAS offers several advantages over traditional external hard drive units. Today, NAS products are available from a wide variety of vendors, including companies like Netgear that also sell networking gear to many home users as well as small-to-medium-sized businesses. In this article, we will focus in on five of these advantages.
The first advantage NAS has over traditional external hard drives is that a NAS is actually a specialized Linux server dedicating to managing underlying storage for you. This can allow many businesses to unplug and eliminate an existing Windows or Linux server and maintaining fewer servers while offering the same (or better) capabilities is always a good thing. The second benefit NAS devices have over an external hard drive is one of sheer access speed. NAS can be connected into your server infrastructure using standard 1Gbps networking, which is significantly faster than the USB 2.0 connection used to access the external hard drive. Newer NAS units also offer multiple network access ports which can be used to improve redundancy but also provide support for more advanced network configurations.
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