Storing, managing, and protecting your data is no easy task. Today’s IT environments can be complex. With the growing number of IT technologies becoming widely adopted, it is now more important than ever to evaluate storage technology choices. Some of you may be looking at NAS storage and SAN technology to see which one is right for you. Network Attached Storage and SAN are both network storages, but these two have some very distinct differences.
I’m going to walk you through some of those differences concerning price, flexibility, and use. So, here are some thoughts about what each is good for.
Let’s talk about the costs first.
NAS storage is cheaper in terms of upfront costs, while SAN storage has a lower operating price. The reason for that is that the best NAS systems are commodity hardware with lots of disks linked together over a high-speed, dedicated network which reduces the overall cost of the NAS storage system. On the other hand, SAN uses single-purpose industrial-grade disk controllers and Fibre Channel, increasing the costs.
Managing both storages
Managing a NAS is comparatively more straightforward and does not require technical expertise. Network Attached Storage is more like a plug-and-play device with minimal setup. However, SAN storage devices are more complex to configure and require expertise in IT. This also increases the cost of hiring skilled employees to manage the SAN environment.
How do they compare in terms of scalability?
While lower-end NAS storage systems may not offer that much scalability, higher-end enterprise NAS models like StoneFly’s super scale out NAS appliances offer petabytes of storage in one 36 bay appliance that can be further scaled out based on your needs. This makes it an extremely viable choice for enterprise businesses.
On the other hand, SAN can be scaled by adding more storage controllers or expanding the storage arrays.
The most important – Speed!
With NAS storage, Speed is dependent on your local network, usually up to 10GbE. It is also affected by other users who access the storage simultaneously. In general, you have slower throughput and greater latency due to a slow Ethernet connection, Ethernet packetization, waiting time, and general latency.
On the other hand, SAN has a very high speed as it uses Fibre Channel, typically with speeds up to 16Gb/s and 32 Gb/s. Fibre Channel can be provided through high-speed Ethernet-like 10Gb or 40Gb networks, with protocols like FCoE or iSCSI.
Bottom Line
We hope this helped you understand the fundamental differences between these two different technologies that aim to achieve the same goal. So now you can decide which is the most suitable choice for your business.
