SAN vs NAS

SAN stands for storage area network. SANs is a high-speed network that provides access to different kinds of data storage devices with data severs associated to the network. In most cases a SAN is used within large companies that have computer networks.  An article I was reading talked about what SANs supports, the article stated “SANs support disk mirroring, backup and restore, archival and retrieval of archived data, data migration from one storage device to another and the sharing of data among different servers in a network. “ From this sentence you can see that there are many advantages to using a storage area network.

NAS stands for Network-attached storage. NAS is a hard disk storage device that has its own network address and provides file-based data storage services to other devices on the same network.  A network attached storage device has a local area network and is assigned an IP address.  NAS devices are configured through the web and you don’t have to go somewhere and access a box to configure it. Network-attached storage consists of hard disk storage that uses the multi disk RAID system. An article I read talked about what the NAS software offers. It says “ NAS software can usually handle a number of network, protocols, including Microsoft’s Internetwork Packet Exchange, and NETBEUI, Novell’s Netware Internetwork Packet Exchange, and Sun Microsystems’ Network File System. “  NAS has many useful features that will be useful to certain companies depending on their need.

SAN and NAS are different but have similar features. There are many advantages sand disadvantage to eat one of these products. I feel that one of them isn’t better than the other because they both have features that would be good depending on the companies needs.  I would personally pick NAS simply because of the fact that you can access it and configure things through the web.  For everyday people being able to do stuff through the web is better than going to the actually machine to make changes.