What is the difference between nas and nfs

However, enterprise IT budgets are not infinite, and organizations need to optimize their storage expenditures to suit their priority requirements. This article will help you do that by defining NAS vs SAN, calling out their distinctions, and presenting usage cases for both architectures. Both network-attached storage NAS and storage area network SAN were developed to solve the problem of making stored data available to a lot of users at once.

A NAS is a single storage device that serves files over Ethernet and is relatively inexpensive and easy to set up, while a SAN is a tightly coupled network of multiple devices that work with block-based data and is more expensive and complex to set up and manage. A NAS is a computer connected to a network that provides file-based data storage services to other devices on the network.

The primary strength of NAS is how simple it is to set up and deploy. NAS volumes appear to the user as network mounted volume. The files to be served are typically contained on one or more storage drives, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAID. Although a NAS is usually not designed to be a general-purpose server, NAS vendors and third parties are increasingly offering other software to provide server-like functionality on a NAS.

NAS devices offer an easy way for multiple users in diverse locations to access data, which is valuable when uses are collaborating on projects or sharing information. NAS provides good access controls and security to support collaboration, while also enabling someone who is not an IT professional to administer and manage access to the data.

It also offers good fundamental data security through the use of redundant data structures — often RAID — and automatic backup services to local devices and to the cloud. The weaknesses of a NAS are related to scale and performance. As more users need access, the server might not be able to keep up and could require the addition of more server horsepower. The other weakness is related to the nature of Ethernet itself.

By design, Ethernet transfers data from one place to another via packets, dividing the source into a number of segments and sending them along to their destination. Any of those packets could be delayed, or sent out of order, and might not be available to the user until all of the packets arrive and are put back in order. Any latency slow or retried connections is usually not noticed by users for small files, but can be a major problem in demanding environments such as video production, where files are extremely large and latency of more than a few milliseconds can disrupt production steps such as rendering.

SAN is a dedicated high-performance network for consolidated block-level storage. The network interconnects storage devices, switches, and hosts. Servers identify the SAN as locally attached storage, so multiple servers can share a storage pool.

SANs are not dependent on the LAN and relieves pressure on the local network by offloading data directly from attached servers. A SAN is a way to provide users shared access to consolidated, block level data storage, even allowing multiple clients to access files at the same time with very high performance. A SAN enhances the accessibility of storage devices such as disk arrays and tape libraries by making them appear to users as if they were external hard drives on their local system.

Video editing requires fair and prioritized bandwidth usage across the network, which is an advantage of SAN. A primary strength of a SAN is that all of the file access negotiation happens over Ethernet while the files are served via extremely high speed Fibre Channel, which translates to very snappy performance on the client workstations, even for very large files.

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Has any NBA team come back from ? Has a team Table of Contents How much is Sidney Crosby worth? Active 5 months ago. Viewed 81k times. Improve this question. Or even editing the title if you can do that. Jed Daniels - I've updated my title — warren.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Kyle Brandt Kyle Brandt Most NetApp etc appliances generally have a better feature set than "a Linux server" as well. Not trying to argue, I'm curious. Performance with LVM snapshots is terrible - LVM stores a separate copy of the "exceptions" or changes for each snapshot. So if you have 10 snapshots and then write to your original, you have to copy the changes 10 times - once to each snapshot.

There are patches around for a common exception store which does improve performance somewhat. True SANs contribute to storage-specific networks. Chopper3 Chopper3 99k 9 9 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Warren - Once a NAS is configured for a specific environment though, admin should be dead simple and you shouldn't need to spend time figuring out eg why the init. They reduce the "maintenance surface" of the device you're serving files from, compared to a full-blown Solaris or Linux machine that is exporting NFS shares, or a Windows file server.

It's not just about a fancy UI. NAS: Network-attached storage NAS is file-level computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous network clients. NFS: Network File System NFS is a network file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems in ,[1] allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a network in a manner similar to how local storage is accessed. While your answer is technically correct, you are only replying to the title question, not the real one.

Maybe you should be voting down the actual question, because it was poorly phrased to begin with? This is a good answer to the question as originally posed and therefore does not deserve a downvote.

I find it ironic that you vote down my answer for reply to the title question only, yet you, yourself, do not bother to fully reply to question either.

Perhaps was I to eager to cast my first down vote on serverfault. The FAQ tells down votes are for misinformation which your reply certainly isn't.