Summary

This chapter has introduced us to the concepts of Network Attached Storage and Storage Area Networks as options to improve performance and manageability over traditional Direct Attached Storage. We've seen how SAN and NAS can be used to manage data more effectively through the reduction of servers.

Applications like Exchange can be made to support much larger numbers of users through the leveraging of large numbers of disks. Performance scales nearly 1:1 as additional disks are added. Plus adding additional disks allows an application to support more IO operations per second, which is critical to database applications.

You've seen how advanced technologies like snapshotting enable you to back up data regularly on the device itself so that users can recover their own data without having to involve administrators.

NAS implementations work with existing Ethernet infrastructures and impart additional loads on them that must be planned for. You've seen that a strong network is the key to good NAS performance.

This chapter discussed some common Microsoft applications that work well with both NAS and SAN storage. You've learned that SAN provides block-level access to the disk, whereas NAS provides file-level access. Some applications require SAN but most can work with NAS.

SAN and NAS offer you greater performance and enables you to perform geographic mirroring that was previously impossible for the application itself. As Ethernet and Fiber Channel technologies continue to improve and as prices continue to fall you will find NAS and SAN becoming more and more common in the IT world.