Storage

SAN, NAS and DAS are the key words that are currently dominating the world of IT storage. However the importance and advantages of these very different storage concepts are frequently unclear. MAXDATA provides you with solutions and competence to help you to set up and use the best possible hardware environments in economical terms.

The advantages of consolidation via SAN
	The advantages of consolidation via SAN Reducing administration costs by up to 50% Reducing personnel costs Does not burden the LAN (Local Area Network)

Storage consolidation

Consolidated storage solutions remove the problem of locally available storage capacities (DAS) on one server that are not available to other servers on the network. In contrast to time-intensive and costly decentralised storage structures, consolidated storage boots productivity and performance. When centrally administrated the information is available more quickly, securely and across the company. This optimises resource capacity and reduces response times.

NAS

For those who want to efficiently optimize their storage resources at an affordable price, NAS (Network Attached Storage) is an attractive solution. Equipped with a processor and an operating system, hard drives in a RAID network, and a high-performance network card, the NAS server provides applications with cost-effective high-speed storage and substantial capacities. Flexibly and easily. With this technology, not only large company departments, but especially smaller and mid-sized businesses can expand their storage volume with extreme ease. In a typical NAS infrastructure the NAS server is connected to the LAN. This is due to the fact that although NAS systems separate storage from the respective server in the same way as SANs (Storage Area Networks), in contrast to SAN setups, NAS systems are connected directly to the local network. Because of this arrangement, NAS systems make it possible to expand partially required storage space – but without changing the existing client/server architecture. Additionally, NAS installations can be used in heterogeneous operating system environments without any problems. Typical uses are as file and print servers.

SAN

SAN solutions increase the utilisation of storage media and hard disk devices by around two thirds. This can reduce the expense of hardware and maintenance as well as the cost of software licences and energy. Furthermore SAN provides substantially higher performance than common solutions. But that is not all. The advantages of SAN are demonstrated above all in much simpler administration. The consolidation reduces personnel costs although the number of storage resources increases because the storage capacities are administrated centrally in the storage-area-network. The attractiveness of this effect is demonstrated by the fact that over half of the costs of managing storage are personnel costs. A key argument for the use of SANs