Storage technologies and protocols
Within the world of storage, you can find three main architectures:
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
Storage Area Network (SAN)
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Direct Attached Storage
A Direct Attached Storage (DAS) is a storage subsystem that is directly attached to a server or workstation using a cable. Typically, a DAS system is based on an enclosure containing several hard disk drives. In some cases, storage shelves can be connected to multiple servers so the data or the disks can be shared (for example for fault tolerance). DAS systems also offers fault-tolerance features and are able to "hot swap" failed disks and to rebuild disk from parity on other disks.
Common storage protocols for DAS are SATA, SAS, and Fibre Channel.
Note
Prefer SAS hard drives over SATA hard drives in order to achieve high performance.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated storage network that provides access to consolidated, block-level storage. SANs primarily...
