Storage Fundamentals

By
Kiran Balimidi
Table of Contents
• What is Storage?
• Basic types of Storage devices
• Why Storage Grew So much?
• Storage Topologies
• Disk Types
• RAID Technologies
What is Storage?

In IT World Storage can be termed as a place where data is

“Kept”
“Stockpiled”
Or Simple “Held”

Storage devices or Media are computing hardware used for “Storing” ,”Porting”, and “
Extracting datafiles or Objects”.

It can hold and stores information temporarily or permanently and can be internal or
External to computer or Server.
Two Basic types of Storage Devices
Why Storage Grew So Much

We are happy the way things why storage grew so much to have become a
separate domain in itself?
Well, the simplest answer is to this is EXPONENTIAL GRWOTH OF DATA!!
It was just Impossible to for simplest internal storage devices to deal with so
much data/information capacity growth.
So, a lot of storage technologies came into picture Like DAS(Direct Attached
storage),Leading to NAS ( Network attached storage) which further led to big
world of SAN (Storage Area Network).
Storage Topologies:

 DAS (Direct Attached storage)

 NAS(Network Attached Storage)
 SAN (Storage Area Network)
DAS (DIRECT ACCESS STORAGE):-
DAS CHALLENGES:
Hosts must be directly connected.
Scalability is limited.
Number of connectivity ports to hosts.
Number of addressable disks
Distance limitations.
Down time required for maintenance.
NAS (NETWORK ATTACHED
STORAGE):-

NFS - (Network File System):- It is used for UNIX based Servers.

CIFS-(Common Interface File System):- It is used for WINDOWS based systems.
NAS controller in NAS server or (CIFS or NFS) will convert File I/O into
Block I/O into the Storage Devices.

NAS CHALLENGES:-
 SPEED
 RELIABULITY
 SECURITY
SAN (Storage Area Network):-
BENEFITS OF SAN:-

• High band width - Fiber channel

• SCSI Extension - Block I/O
• Resource consolidation- Centralized storage and management.
• Scalability- Up to 16 Million devices
• Secure access-Isolation and Filtering
Disk Types:
For High Performance we are using below drives

Hard Disk Drives (HDD)

Solid State Drives (SSD)
NVMe Drives
RAID Types:
Redundant array of independent disk or Redundant array of inexpensive disk

Below are different types of RAID Technologies

RAID 0 – Striping
RAID 1 – Mirroring
RAID 3 – Parity
RAID 5 – Distributed parity
RAID 6 – Double Distributed Parity
RAID 1+0 or 0+1 – Mirroring and Striping
 RAID 0
(Stripping):
 RAID 1
(Mirroring)
 RAID 3
(Dedicated
Parity)
 RAID 5
(Distributed
Parity)
 RAID 6
(Dual
Distributed
Parity)
RAID 1+0 or
0+1
(Mirroring
and Stripping)
Storage Vendor and Products
• EMC
• NetApp
• HP
• Hitachi
• IBM
• Pure Storage