How NAS Network Storage can Benefit Your Business

How NAS Network Storage can Benefit Your Business

A Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is basically a central hard drive for storing and serving up data files from multiple devices. They offer businesses a way to centralize data storage and eliminate the need for companies to have dedicated storage devices for each client or server system.

What is the Difference Between NAS and SAN?

With NAS architectures, heterogeneous systems, such as PCs, Macs and servers can all access and share the same stored files. NAS network storage is often confused with Storage Area Network (SAN) architectures even though the two are very different. With NAS network storage, the goal is to centrally store enterprise data so that it can be accessed by multiple servers and client systems. The goal behind setting up a SAN environment on the other hand, is to optimize storage resource utilization by pooling and sharing storage resources among multiple systems.

How do NAS Storage Devices Work?

From a technology standpoint, NAS storage devices are little more than stripped down file servers dedicated to the task of storing and serving up files to multiple systems on a network. The systems are platform agnostic, so they are directly accessible by almost any server or client system on the network. NAS storage devices are connected directly to the network either via Ethernet or in wireless fashion. NAS devices are specialized hardware appliances featuring their own operating system and powerful microprocessors for running NAS software and the disk drives in them.

Often, NAS storage devices feature two or more hard drives arranged in logical arrays known as RAID arrays. Such systems are designed to automatically maintain two copies of each data file for increased protection. With RAID arrays, in case one drive fails, a copy of the data is always available in another drive.

How Can a Business Benefit from NAS?

Businesses can derive multiple benefits from implementing NAS storage architectures. One of the most significant benefits of the technology is that it lets businesses centralize their data and make it accessible to multiple client and server systems on the network far more cost-effectively than traditional file server or direct attached storage models. NAS network storage architectures also allow companies to add or remove storage resources without disruption, unlike server attached storage where the file server typically needs to be taken offline in order to increment storage resources. In addition, NAS storage devices are optimized for both file serving and for data storage purposes. As a result, NAS storage devices typically offer significantly better data access speeds and performance than generic file servers. The data centralization that is enabled by NAS architectures also helps reduce some of the cost and complexity involved in managing file serving systems.

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