Question

Discuss the differences between a SAN and a NAS. When would you use one over the other.

Answer 1

Following are the differences between NAS and SAN:-

NAS stands for Network attached storage. where as SAN stands for Storage area network.

NAS is a centralized storage device for storing data on a network whereas SAN is a high speed netwrok that stores and provides access to large amounts of data.

NAS will have multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration whereas SANs are fault tolerant and data is shared among several disk arrays.

NAS is directly attaches to a switch or router on a network. It is used in homes and small to medium-size businesses whereas SAN are not affected by network traffic, such as bottlenecks in a local area network and it is not cheap and it mainly used by large companies.