Storage area network

A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer storage

devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes) to servers in such a
way that the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system. Although the cost
and complexity of SANs are dropping, they are uncommon outside larger enterprises.

Storage sharing

DAS vs NAS vs SAN

Organization

Historically, data centers first created "islands" of SCSI disk arrays as direct-attached
storage (DAS), each dedicated to an application, and visible as a number of "virtual hard
drives" (i.e. LUNs). Essentially, a SAN consolidates such storage islands together using a
high-speed network.

Operating systems maintain their own file systems on them on dedicated, non-shared
LUNS, as though they were local to themselves. If multiple systems were simply to
attempt to share a LUN, these would interfere with each other and quickly corrupt the
data. Any planned sharing of data on between computers within a LUN requires
advanced solutions, such as SAN file systems or clustered computing.

Despite such issues, SANs help to increase storage capacity utilization, since multiple
servers consolidate their private storage space onto the disk arrays.

Common uses of a SAN include provision of transactionally accessed data that require
high-speed block-level access to the hard drives such as email servers, databases, and
high usage file servers.

[edit] SAN and NAS

In contrast to SAN, network attached storage (NAS) uses file-based protocols such as
NFS or SMB/CIFS where it is clear that the storage is remote, and computers request a
portion of an abstract file rather than a disk block. Lately, the introduction of NAS heads
allowed easy conversion of SAN storage to NAS.

[edit] SAN-NAS hybrid

Hybrid using DAS, NAS and SAN technologies.

Despite the differences between NAS and SAN, it is possible to create solutions that
include both technologies, as shown in the diagram.