SAN is fibre based and is an architecture that implements SAN appliances. You'll have to configure hosts, switches and the appliances themselves.
NAS is an actual system, server if you will. All you have to do is plug it in to your existing network and add it as a domain server. The NAS itself is limited in how many drives you can add to it. You have to buy a seperate DAS solution or connect it to a SAN solution to get more space.
Fiber drives are faster than SCSI, SATA or SAS (NAS drives or DAS hard drives)
Reccomendation will always lean more towards EMC SAN, but if you're looking for cost effectiveness you could go with a MD1000 SAS DAS enclosure. Not as fast as Fibre, but it's the fastest non-san device dell has available right now.
Simple answer, cost !! A SAN is expensive and a NAS is less expensive.
The main difference: Data transfer to a NAS is done at file level by user share. The user requests a file and that is transferred from the share.
Data transfer to a SAN is done at block level, ie your server sees a hard disk not a mapped share. When a file is requested, it's exactly the same as getting data from a local disk.
In this way it is faster, plus the benefits of faster hardware and better redundancy.
To expand on tommo66'd statement; a SAN can only provide access to the same data to multiple servers if they are clustered as the SAN storage is treated as a block level device. If you were to allow multiple servers access without them being clustered, you will end up becoming very familiar with your tape backup solution :-). Think of it like this; one server writes/changes a file and wants to change the MFT to reflect the change, while at the exact same time another server is trying to make changes too. They may partually overwrite eachother and cause corruption.
On a NAS solution this doesn't happen, as a NAS solution is a server (like previously mentioned) that just shares storage out to whoever you give permission to access it, but only the server OS on the NAS itself accesses the disks in the server.
Storagetalk
221 Posts
0
July 11th, 2006 11:00
SAN is fibre based and is an architecture that implements SAN appliances. You'll have to configure hosts, switches and the appliances themselves.
NAS is an actual system, server if you will. All you have to do is plug it in to your existing network and add it as a domain server. The NAS itself is limited in how many drives you can add to it. You have to buy a seperate DAS solution or connect it to a SAN solution to get more space.
Fiber drives are faster than SCSI, SATA or SAS (NAS drives or DAS hard drives)
Reccomendation will always lean more towards EMC SAN, but if you're looking for cost effectiveness you could go with a MD1000 SAS DAS enclosure. Not as fast as Fibre, but it's the fastest non-san device dell has available right now.
tommo666
3 Apprentice
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1.2K Posts
0
July 11th, 2006 19:00
Simple answer, cost !! A SAN is expensive and a NAS is less expensive.
The main difference: Data transfer to a NAS is done at file level by user share. The user requests a file and that is transferred from the share.
Data transfer to a SAN is done at block level, ie your server sees a hard disk not a mapped share. When a file is requested, it's exactly the same as getting data from a local disk.
In this way it is faster, plus the benefits of faster hardware and better redundancy.
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
0
July 17th, 2006 03:00
On a NAS solution this doesn't happen, as a NAS solution is a server (like previously mentioned) that just shares storage out to whoever you give permission to access it, but only the server OS on the NAS itself accesses the disks in the server.
Message Edited by Dev Mgr on 07-16-200611:14 PM