Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
How do NAS and SAN systems compare to each other?
I run a small company and we are looking into different storage systems for our network. How do NAS and SAN systems compare to each other? What would be more beneficial for a relatively small business?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
5 Answers
Hey Elia,
I would say that for a SMB the best way to go would be an iSCSI SAN. FC San has been the king for a long time, but now the table has begun to fall to the side of iSCSI. Don't get me wrong, FC will still be around for a long-long time, but a big part of the market is already starting to choose iSCSI because of the cost, scalability, and HW independence.
NAS, on the other hand, is great for low-maintenance environments, because it requires almost none administrative knowledge and/or effort, it can be easily set-up on a small and cheap box and run for years before it needs support. However, it does not provide any of the key performance and security qualities that both FC and iSCSI SAN do. For instance, any Virtualization platform that runs over NAS (NFS, to be accurate), would have at least a 25% performance over any FC or iSCSI SAN. Not to mention availability, SAN (in any conductor available, either FC or iSCSI) can offer data mirroring and instant-background snapshots, providing a full tolerant, highly available provisioning system.
So, in conclusion I would say the following:
1) For cheap, easy, non-critical issues like file sharing, go with NAS.
2) For high-importance production environments, SAN is the way to go. From that point it's up to you to decide wether to go with FC or iSCSI. But both choices are the best to provide HA and FT to your DataCenter.
If you'd like to continue this or would like to hear more from me, send me an email at katz [at] mkit.com.ar.
Kindest Regards,
Hi elia,
The short answer is "It depends".
It depends on what IT services are required for your business & the criticality of each one of them.
But,, going with an assumption of small business.
I would say a unified storage which offers (best of both worlds) NAS(file level)(NFS for unix,CIFS for windows) & IP SAN(iSCSI for block level data) is ideal & scalable to a certain extent (again,, keep in mind this is also depends on the performance/availability/scalability expectations).
Since you are starting off or in the initial phases,, keep in mind that the data should all be in a centralized location(avoid data sprawl) as much as possible. So having a unified storage helps/enables you to have all data (file & block level) on the same device.
Like i mentioned ,, you get the best of both worlds with unified storage and i feel that it is something for you to seriously consider.
If you need more details on what i am referring to ,, drop me a note at sm@optit.in
--SM
It really depends on how fast you need storage access as well shared access to the drive(storage). SAN's allocate space to specific attached servers, where NAS are available directly to anyone on the network (with security clearance). SANS's data transfer rate are much faster, however you might have one host connected to the SAN that is sharing that connection to multiple clients (like a SQL Server or cluster). You could have a single server attached to a SAN that is sharing that connection acting as a NAS to the rest of the users.
Hope I didn't confuse, but those are the two main issues, how fast do you need access to the data, and do you want expandable storage for all users/applications of that shared storage?
Best,
Depends on what you are going to do with it. If you're a business with less than 100 users and only ever need say 10TB then you can get something like a Drobo designed for home/small business users. Drobo is a NAS but can also work as a USB attached SAN.
If you need something more robust and ONLY want to server files up then you can't really beat a NAS. SAN's are great if you're building say a SQL farm or Clustering Microsoft Exchange, but they're typically really expensive. If you are say a medium business with 200 users, or require a tremendous amount of demand from a SAN then I would recommend investing in a NetApp. NetApp hardware costs about 30k, but you can buy it as both a NAS and ISCSI. This will allow you to have applications with a virtual, or shared storage disk if you will, and allow you to also have a portion that is just NAS. In the case of NetApp they have proprietary file system that makes it much faster than windows in the case of simple file sharing to users.
Do a lot of research, but ultimately SAN is a newer technology than NAS. Here is a link, although slightly outdated since it assumes SAN over Fiber, when now we have iSCSI SAN too
http://www.nas-san.com/differ.html
Answer This Question