Question

1. Assess NAS versus SAN. What is the relationship between these concepts and system architecture?

2. Describe the ramifications of the virtualization of storage.

Answer 1

storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS)   solved the problem of making stored data.It is available to a lot of users at once. both  of them provides required storage for a group of users, but they couldn’t be more different in their approach to achieving their goals.

NAS VS SAN

NAS used in homes ,  medium ,or small businesses sized but storage area network used in professional and enterprise environments.

In NAS Generally slower throughput and higher latency due to slower file system layer .,in Some SANs use iSCSI as a less expensive but slower alternative to Fibre Channel.

NAS is less expensive and Data accessed as if it were a network-attached drive.SAS is more expensive and requires more administration Servers access data as if it were a local hard drive (blocks).

SAN such as SCSI, iSCSI, FCoE network architecture enables admins to scale both performance and capacity as needed works with virtualization but NAS have high-end NAS scale to petabytes using clusters or scale-out nodes does not work with virtualization.

Take one example of an e-commerce website, where huge number  of people are making orders per second, and this all needs to be stored properly in the database for later use. The storage technology used to store such high traffic data bases must be fast in request serving and fast response.In such cases we can use SAN. As application servers used to have their own storage devices attached to them. A protocol known as Small Computer System Interface by which Server's talk to these devices . SCSI is nothing but a standard used to communicate between storage and severs devices. All normal hard disks, tape drives and others  uses SCSI. In the beginning a storage devices fulfilled the storage needs of a server that was included inside the server(the server used to talk to those internal storage device, using SCSI.

2. Virtualization of storage implicate the actual complexity of a storage system, such as a SAN, which helps a storage administrator perform the tasks of backup, archiving and recovery more easily and in less time.Storage virtualization runs on more than one  storage devices and made them appear as if they were a single storage pool and greatly increasing efficiency and manageability.

The process involves reflecting and enclosing  the internal functions of a storage device from the host application, host servers or a usual network in order to facilitate the application and network-independent management of storage.Storage virualization is also known as cloud storage.The management of storage and data is becoming difficult and time consuming. it helps to address this problem by facilitating easy backup, archiving and recovery tasks by taking less time. the benefits of storage virtualization include automated management, expansion of storage capacity, reduced time in manual supervision, easy updates and reduced downtime.

Currently there are 3 methods of storage virtualization:

1.Server-based virtualization

2.Fabric-based virtualization

3.Storage array-based virtualization