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Network attached storage

sram

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 30, 2007
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Hello storage gurus!

I'm posting this just to be more familiar with NAS. I read the wikipedia article, and one of my questions is: Do you just connect the NAS device via ethernet to your network(link the NAS to the main switch) and it will just be detectable by computers present in the network?

Or how does it really work?

I assume that using NAS will be advantageous to -say for example- sharing a big drive installed in one of the computers, right? And that's because the storage everybody is accessing will NOT go away like in the case of the shared drive if its host computer needs to be restarted for some reason, or if it just went bad and it needs maintenance....right?

I mean, is it similar to how network printers work? If a printer needs to be shared, it is better to directly connect it via cat5/cat6 to the network switch (if is a network printer) instead of locally connecting to one of the machines and then enable sharing for it.

Sorry if i'm asking too many stupid questions, but I just need to understand.

And how does it really differ from SAN? From its name, it seems like SAN is a network built solely for storage purposes, right?

Thanks in advance for all comments and feedback.
 
I'm posting this just to be more familiar with NAS. I read the wikipedia article, and one of my questions is: Do you just connect the NAS device via ethernet to your network(link the NAS to the main switch) and it will just be detectable by computers present in the network?

Or how does it really work?

Generally you'll create "shares" using various protocols. For *nix, NFS, for Windows, SMB/CIFS. There are others, those seem to be the most common however. You can then "mount" this shares on other devices and access them as if they're local storage.
 
and SAN and NAS are generally very similar, but to your point a SAN is typically on a dedicated storage network and usually a large scale set of devices with enterprise grade features. SANs typically are block level vs. NAS being file level.
 
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