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Storage Area Networks For Dummies®

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Chapter 17<br />

Ten Reasons NOT to Use a SAN<br />

In This Chapter<br />

▶ Finding out whether a SAN makes sense for you<br />

▶ Choosing the best storage solution for your needs<br />

<strong>Storage</strong> area networks (SANs) aren’t for everyone. A storage network can<br />

pay for itself in a very small period of time, but only if you’re in a position<br />

to take advantage of everything a SAN has to offer. A SAN may only make<br />

sense for your company if you have the right staff, budget, and business<br />

requirements to support it. If your storage requirements fall into one of the<br />

following ten scenarios, a SAN might not be right for you.<br />

You Need Larger File Servers<br />

If all you need is file sharing, then Network Attached <strong>Storage</strong> (NAS) may make<br />

more sense for you. If you require all your servers to have access to the same<br />

information at the same time, as is the case with Web servers, NAS is a better<br />

solution. NAS allows you to use your corporate network to share data among<br />

servers. Access to files based on NAS takes place over a standard Internet<br />

Protocol (IP) network. You can create a NAS server from a standard Unix<br />

or Windows server by creating a shared folder on the server so others can<br />

access that folder over the network. This technique is called a file share.<br />

Clients can connect to these file shares over the corporate network, and can<br />

share access to the files located in the shared folders. Whereas SANs use<br />

the SCSI protocol to access information as blocks of disk space, NAS enables<br />

access to storage as files over an IP network. Network File System (NFS) and<br />

Common Internet File Services (CIFS) are the protocols used for NAS. The<br />

great thing about NAS is that multiple users can have access to the same files<br />

at the same time.

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