Network Storage - A Primer

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We all are living in an Information age. We have all our devices connected and even a bigger human network sharing data in the form of ideas, thoughts with each other. We need a place where we can store all this data, access it as and when we want and get rid of it after the purpose is achieved.

Traditionally data have been stored on following devices -

  • Hard Disk Drive: A block device comes with every computer out there…
  • Floppy disk: Probably you can see one in a computing museum now a days
  • CD/DVD: More advanced for of floppy; and now becoming obsolete pretty fast
  • USB: A flash device which is handy

Now some of the above mentioned devices are not in use these days, other still are! But all these devices have one common drawback; a limited storage space!

There comes the Network('ed) Storage; which sits on your network and stores/serves to all your data access needs.
Let's dive deeper in this fascinating world of storage systems.

Types of Storage

Network Storage comes in various types. But at a very high level; subdivided in following two categories:

  1. Network Attached Storage (NAS)
  1. Storage Area Network (SAN)

Let's know more about those storage systems!

NAS is a file based storage. So essentially you have a traditional fileserver sitting in your network, exposing the data storage over most commonly used storage protocols such as Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB). It is the simplest of the two and makes use of your existing network infrastructure in its most basic topological form.

 

On the other end of a spectrum; we have SAN. It also has a variant which makes use of your existing TCP/IP network to serve your data needs - iSCSI! SAN also has a more high-end, high-speed sibling of iSCSI, which is Fibre Channel. While both these protocols make use of SCSI at the core, the way they transmit the data differs significantly.

Both these storage types have their own use cases. These mostly differ by deployment scenario (which applications), existing infrastructure, performance SLA for end users, budget etc.

There also is a third type; Object Storage. In this case the stored data is referred to as Object. Unlike the File (NAS) and Block (SAN) storage, the Object storage is flat and every object is stored at the same level (not object within other object). Objects are referenced thru their metadata (aka data of data) and a UID of a particular object. The later makes it simple and fast to retrieve a specific object form the vast pool of data. The most common use case for Object Storage  is Cloud based storage such as Dropbox, Gdrive etc.

 

In next article let's take a peek into more advanced forms of Storage systems such as Software Defined Storage, All-Flash Arrays, Converged Storage etc.


Keep learning and stay updated! 

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