In the today world of it we need constantly heard about the two new words NAS and SAN but the new folks don’t understand about that and get confuse about that. With the help of this tutorial will explain about the NAS and SAN in very easy way. In that way they can understand about that and also they will never forget about that.
Table of Contents
What is NAS?
NAS stands for Network attached storage. So as a name suggest any storage device that is attached to a network and share between the groups of use in order to access that data. That’s mean NAS.
Let understand this with a simple example you have your home network your ISP provide you the internet and that is connected to your home router and now various devices are connected to that router like your Phone, Laptop, Desktop or Your Android TV. You want to watch your favorite movies that you downloaded in your system. but you want to watch that move in your Android TV for that you need to transfer that Movie into a USB drive and then you need to attached that your TV and then you can start watching that. But what if you attached a storage device example a hard drive into your Router and gave the access that any one can access the data from this drive into your home network. So now you just need to put your movie into this drive and your are good to go. You can now watch your movie from any where in the home and from any device.
Benefit of the NAS
- Easy to setup
- No Specialized hardware is needed
- Easy to maintain
- Wont required a dedicated staff to handles that
- Easy for small to mid scale companies
Disadvantage of NAS
- Redundancy is not there
- Scalability
What is SAN?
SAN stands for the Storage Area Network, Where you created a dedicated area that will handles only storage. Let understand this with some example.
You have 3 storage devices you have 3 routers or switches. You connected all these devices in a mesh topology so that if some hardware failure will occur still our setup can run the operation we can understand the SAN from below diagram.
Advantage of SAN
- Highly Redundant Aka High Availability
- Great for enterprises
Disadvantage of SAN
- Need a dedicated Staff
- Costly Solution
Conclusion
If you are under budget and you need a storage solution go with the NAS but if you are looking something more reliable and powerful then go with the SAN.
