NAS vs SAN - Network Attached Storage vs Storage Area Network

what is the difference between a Nass and a SAN so that is the topic of this video so we'll first talk about what a Nass is now Nass or na s stands for network attached storage if you wanted to store data in a centralized location where it can be accessed from all of your devices on your network you can do this by using a network attached storage device an ass is a storage device that is used for storing data and it doesn't do anything else besides storing data now typically an ass is a box that will have multiple hard drives in a raid configuration for redundancy and it'll also have a network interface card that will directly attach to a switch or router so that the data can be accessed over a network then once it's on the network it can be accessed from other devices such as desktops laptops and servers and it can be accessed as a shared drive now NASA's are typically used in homes and they are also used in small to medium-sized businesses but one of the main disadvantages with an S is that it has a single point of failure so as an example let's say if a component fails such as if the power supply fails on the NASS then all of the other devices will not be able to access its data now a SAN or storage area network is a special high-speed network that stores and provides access to large amounts of data so basically it's a dedicated network that's used for data storage and this network consists of multiple disk arrays switches and servers and because it has more than one of these devices a san is fault tolerant and the data is also shared among several disk arrays so if a switch or disk array or if a server goes down the data can still be accessed and when a server accesses the data on a sand it accesses the data as if it was a local hard drive because that's how operating systems recognize a SAN it's recognized as a local attached hard drive rather than a shared network drive like in a mass and sands are also highly scalable because adding more storage space can easily be done without an interruption on the network so as stated before a SAN is a high-speed network and that's because Ennis and all the devices are interconnected meaning that all of the devices are connected to each other and they are interconnected using fiber channel which is a standard person's fiber channel is fiber optics and it has speeds between 2 gigabits per second all the way up to 128 gigabytes per second so fiber channel is extremely fast and it's also very expensive and most stands today use fiber channel but also as an alternative to fiber channel some sands use eyes Guzzi instead which is a cheaper alternative to fiber channel but it's also not as fast as fiber channel now one of the main reasons for using a SAN is because sands are not affected by network traffic such as bottlenecks that can happen in a local area network and this is because sands aren't really a part of a local area network sands are partitioned off it's basically a network all by itself and other reasons for sands as I mentioned before sands are highly scalable and they are also very redundant and also as you might have guessed sands are not cheap they come at a very high cost which is why they are mainly used by large companies and large organizations