Maximize Space & Save Money

NAS’s & SAN’s, let’s break this down.  If you’ve been involved in any Information Technology (IT) project then you are more than familiar with the fact that IT is chock full of acronyms.  I’m pretty sure IT is right up there with the US Military in how many it uses.  So what is NAS?  Network Attached Storage.  What’s that?  Think of it like a hard drive that is plugged into your network.  You can reach it without having a server set up.  So then what’s a SAN?  Storage Area Network. More simply, it’s just a NAS’s big brother.

So what’s so great about that?  Ultimately it’s similar to the Virtualization scenario in that you are grouping all of your storage space in one pool and then distributing it out as needed to each of your servers.  This allows you to have a bunch of hard drives for redundancy and speed that each have a little bit of the data on them.  That way if one fails you can just pop it out and replace it.  It also allows you to separate your storage of files from a server and add them to another server with a few mouse clicks.  So if one server fails you can keep that file share up and easily accessible while fixing or replacing the hardware.  Some NAS and or SAN hardware has the ability to simply replicate to another device over your WAN for a disaster recovery (DR) scenario.

There are many price points in the NAS and SAN market.  We have implemented this hardware in offices as small as a few people to large corporations. In either scenario it is very easy to see the pro’s simply outweigh the cons.  Ultimately you will save money, have more redundancy, and create a simple scalable storage strategy that will allow you to focus on your business and not on Information Technology.