The weaknesses of a NAS are related to scale and performance. As more users need access, the server might not be able to keep up and could require the addition of more server horsepower. The other weakness is related to the nature of Ethernet itself. By design, Ethernet transfers data from one place to another via packets, dividing the source into a number of segments and sending them along to their destination. Any of those packets could be delayed, or sent out of order, and might not be available to the user until all of the packets arrive and are put back in order.
Any latency slow or retried connections is usually not noticed by users for small files, but can be a major problem in demanding environments such as video production, where files are extremely large and latency of more than a few milliseconds can disrupt production steps such as rendering. SAN is a dedicated high-performance network for consolidated block-level storage. The network interconnects storage devices, switches, and hosts. Servers identify the SAN as locally attached storage, so multiple servers can share a storage pool.
SANs are not dependent on the LAN and relieves pressure on the local network by offloading data directly from attached servers. A SAN is a way to provide users shared access to consolidated, block level data storage, even allowing multiple clients to access files at the same time with very high performance. A SAN enhances the accessibility of storage devices such as disk arrays and tape libraries by making them appear to users as if they were external hard drives on their local system.
Video editing requires fair and prioritized bandwidth usage across the network, which is an advantage of SAN. A primary strength of a SAN is that all of the file access negotiation happens over Ethernet while the files are served via extremely high speed Fibre Channel, which translates to very snappy performance on the client workstations, even for very large files. For this reason SAN is widely used today in collaborative video editing environments.
The challenge of SAN can be summed up in its cost and administration requirements — having to dedicate and maintain both a separate Ethernet network for metadata file requests and implement a Fibre Channel network can be a considerable investment.
That being said, SANs are really the only way to provide very fast data access for a large number of users that also can scale to supporting hundreds of users at the same time. High performance remains a SAN requirement and flash-based fabric protocols are helping to close the gap between FC speeds and slower IP.
A global namespace aggregates multiple NAS file systems to present a consolidated view. SAN file systems enable servers to share files. SAN file systems allow servers to safely share data by providing file-level access to servers on the same LUN. NAS connects directly to an Ethernet network via a cable into an Ethernet switch. SANs are the higher performers for environments that need high-speed traffic such as high transaction databases and ecommerce websites.
NAS generally has lower throughput and higher latency because of its slower file system layer, but high-speed networks can make up for performance losses within NAS. Entry level and NAS devices are not highly scalable, but high-end NAS systems scale to petabytes using clusters or scale-out nodes. In contrast, scalability is a major driver for purchasing a SAN. Provide a powerful, consistent end-user computer EUC experience—regardless of team size, location, complexity.
Storage area networks SANs are the most common storage networking architecture used by enterprises for business-critical applications that need to deliver high throughput and low latency. A rapidly growing portion of SAN deployments leverages all-flash storage to gain its high performance, consistent low latency, and lower total cost when compared to spinning disk.
By storing data in centralized shared storage, SANs enable organizations to apply consistent methodologies and tools for security, data protection , and disaster recovery. A SAN is block-based storage, leveraging a high-speed architecture that connects servers to their logical disk units LUNs. A LUN is a range of blocks provisioned from a pool of shared storage and presented to the server as a logical disk. The server partitions and formats those blocks—typically with a file system—so that it can store data on the LUN just as it would on local disk storage.
SANs make up about two-thirds of the total networked storage market. They are designed to remove single points of failure, making SANs highly available and resilient.
A well-designed SAN can easily withstand multiple component or device failures. Track users' IT needs, easily, and with only the features you need. Learn More ». Denis Kelley This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. Gary D Williams This person is a verified professional.
Because it's FC functionality is largely 'bolted' on. Thai Pepper. BBIAngie wrote: Can you elaborate? Ariel Sandberg wrote: Netapp's can do both. NetApp was the company name long before it did that. No connection. Gary D Williams wrote: Aside from something like FreeNAS I don't know of any storage vendor who package both file and san protocols in a single box as netapp do.
To be more clear NAS is differentiated from those two by protocol. Fair enough, I've not touched much in that market space so it makes sense that they do. This topic has been locked by an administrator and is no longer open for commenting. Read these next
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