In the direct-attached storage vs SAN debate, SANs have been the clear option for massive-enterprise, virtualised environments. This contrasts in comparison to a DAS (straight attached storage) device which is committed to the computer system it straight connects to. The disk arrays in both NAS and DAS are equivalent in function and operation, meaning you can create comparable RAIDS and partition types on both.
For Sun, Honeycomb involved putting NAS disks in the identical all round enclosure as various servers and using an sophisticated file technique to speed applications up. This idea didn’t spread broadly outside Sun but did lead, when Sun was purchased by Oracle, to the supercharged Exalogic and Exadata boxes.
I directly bought, installed, configured, and personally evaluated a assortment of storage devices ranging from low-cost, couple of hundred dollar solutions, to some very cool and critical hardware, which includes some enterprise solutions that price upwards of many various tens-of-thousands of dollars.
That is the really elegant style where you shove in as a lot of tough drives as doable, turn it on, hope it performs, and pray Western Digital invents a Petabyte tough drive prior to you ever have to gracefully deal with this storage problem once more.
Connecting added DAS devices to servers is a small a lot more complex than adding DAS to a Pc, but it is frequently simpler than connecting SAN or NAS devices mainly because it doesn’t demand you to design a network or purchase hardware like routers and switches.