Clark T. Designing Storage Location Networks: A Practical Reference for Implementing Fibre Channel and IP SANs. Concentrating the storage on 1 or far more NAS servers or in a SAN as an alternative of putting storage devices on every application server allows application server configurations to be optimized for operating their applications as an alternative of also storing all the associated data and moves the storage management task to the NAS or SAN system.
It remains to be observed no matter whether these developments are ultimately a good factor for the storage guys, as the folks who make both servers and storage might have a leg up in delivering standardized options with one particular assistance viewpoint.
Of course, you’ll nonetheless have to add drives to your storage area network as your total information approaches capacity, but thin provisioning helps you prevent wasting space on underutilized servers or making new partitions every time you add a physical disk.
For this cause, NAS is also acquiring a location alongside SANs in the enterprise data center as vendors strengthen the scalability and manageability of NAS and larger-speed networks and other advances make the overall performance advantages of block-level data transfer less of an concern.
And you would usually communicate to these storage devices making use of a incredibly standardized kind of communication- some thing like SCSI, serial attached storage, SATA commands, or some other quite frequent way of referencing the storage on that storage device.
