Let's dive into the world of data storage. You ready? YEAH YOU ARE. Let's go.
What is DAS Storage - Direct Attached Storage?
Picture this. You have a laptop. You have way too much crap installed on it/saved on it and DEAR LORD why do you still have your Word files from 2003 on there? One day your laptop is like "NOPE. No more space (aka capacity). Cannot save anything anymore." And you're like, GREAT. I need to go buy an EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE. So you buy one. You connect it to your laptop, and voila, you just configured a#DAS, aka…Direct Attached Storage.
What is NAS - Network Attached Storage?
Cool, cool, cool. But let's think bigger. One year later you're a#GirlBoss CIO of your own company and business is BOOMING. You're no longer a One-Woman-Show with a laptop. You have actual employees. With their own computers. And you NEED MORE STORAGE. Your employees are all on the same computer network (aka, Local Area Network, aka LAN), & their computers are utilizing a network protocol (NOTE: When you see the word protocol, think "instructions") called Server Message Block (aka, SMB), which allows all your employees' computers to connect to the LAN & access files from each other. BUT. The storage capacity from their computer hard drives is not enough for you guys.
So what do you do? You need to purchase more hard drives. But do you just go to the store and get everyone external hard drives to attach to their computers? You could…but if one hard drive fails…it's probably gone forever. You need something with REDUNDANCY. You need #NAS.
I'm sorry, a what? NAS, aka Network Attached Storage, is a physical storage box that contains multiple NAS Drives. It's like an external hard drive, but BIGGER & connects to your network's router (think "traffic director") AND the data stored on one drive is always mirrored to another drive, so if one drive goes down, you STILL have your data. That's called redundancy...BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!!!!!!
What is SAN - Storage Area Network?
So now the #NAS (Network Attached Storage) Drive Box sits in your office and is connected to your LAN's router. Your employees can now save their work on the NAS and access the data from it anywhere in the world…as long as they have the password to access it. But HOL UP. Your company just got featured in #Cosmopolitan. YOU. ARE. FAMOUS. You did it. Your company is now reaching #Enterprise levels. You went from selling#crystals on instagram to selling subscription BOXES of crystals, perfumes, clothes, makeup, magazines to over 100,000 customers globally. THIS. IS. HUGE.
But…that NAS Box sitting in your office? That's not gonna cut it anymore. You've got way too much customer data, website data, vendor data and HR data to hang on to. You need a high-performance storage system that offers the speed of DAS but the sharing flexibility and reliability of NAS.
You need #SAN.
Storage Area Network (SAN) is used in businesses that have their own data centers and are working with virtual #cloudcomputing environments. Your little office is now just one physical space among a fleet of offices all over the world and you have a data center in New Jersey and another data center in London.
SAN is a#storage system that allows you to transfer block-level data (we'll get into that later) between servers and storage devices. Kinda like how your NAS box connected to your router so that your employees can access it, to access your storage in a SAN system, you’ll need a SAN Switch (when you see the word “switch” you can usually thing Traffic Director) which sends data to/from all the connected storage devices and servers.
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