Duking it out in storage. (Tech snapshot: SAN vs. NAS).

Enterprise Systems Journal, November, 2002

It seems that everyone likes a good old-fashioned one-on-one battle. Remember the sensational boxing matches between Tyson and Holyfield, or John Wayne shooting the bad guys in a classic Hollywood western? The premise is generally the same: There are two rivals, but only one will emerge victorious.

Thanks to the emergence of the Internet and networked corporate computing architectures, most companies now have enormous amounts of data to deal with. All this information needs to be stored somewhere, prompting a huge interest in enterprise storage hardware systems.

Enter the two competitors: storage-area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS). A SAN is a network separate from a company's local-area network (LAN), specifically configured to...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.