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ales of storage products reached $3.9 billion inthe fourth quarter of 2005, according to IDC, thebest quarter for the storage market since IDCbegan tracking it in 2001. You can expect the numbersto keep rising.Regardless of industry, size, or age, enterprises areawash in more data than ever before. Fewer businessprocesses rely on paper, and the file cabinets that oncefilled offices for generations are now located on racks inthe server room. Federal regu-lations require that data bestored, protected, and retriev-able for a certain amount of time, and specific industry reg-ulations add to the burden.Storage is one of the mostbasic operations performed bycomputers, yet it continues toevolve. In the days of main-frames, data was stored physi-cally separate from the actual processing unit, but wasstill only accessible through the processing units. As PC-based servers became more commonplace, storagedevices went “inside the box” or in external boxes thatwere connected directly to the system. Each of theseapproaches was valid in its time, but as our need tostore increasing volumes of data and our need to makeit more accessible grew, other alternatives were needed.Network storage is a generic term used to describenetwork-based data storage, but there are many tech-nologies within it. Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is astorage device that is directly attached to a host sys-tem. The simplest example of DAS is the internal harddrive of a server computer, though storage deviceshoused in an external box come under this banner aswell. DAS is still, by far, the most common method of storing data for computer systems.Network Attached Storage, or NAS, is a data storagemechanism that uses special devices connected directlyto the network media. These devices are assigned an IPaddress and can then be accessed by clients via a serv-er that acts as a gateway to the data, or in some casesallows the device to be accessed directly by the clientswithout an intermediary.A Storage Area Network(SAN) is a network of stor-age devices that are con-nected to each other and toa server, or cluster of servers, which act as anaccess point to the SAN. Insome configurations a SANis also connected to the net-work. SANs use specialswitches as a mechanism toconnect the devices. Theseswitches, which look a lotlike a normal Ethernet networking switch, act as theconnectivity pointWhy is it important to learn the basics of storage tech-nology? As mentioned earlier, how enterprises storedata is becoming more than a best practice, it'sbecoming a legal matter as well, and the penalties forindividuals and corporations can be severe.Storage is also a growing area within IT, which meansemployment opportunities exist now, and should existfor some time. According to a one study, fewer than 25percent of either Unix-/Linux- or Windows-based ITorganizations had their own storage management teamat the end of 2004. By the end of 2006, however, thatnumber is expected to soar above 75 percent.
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An Internet.com Storage eBook.© 2007,Jupitermedia Corp.
Storage Basics: A Guide to the World of Storage Technology
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Storage Basics:
A Guide to the World of Storage Technology
Introduction by Michael Pastore
Jupiterimages
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