The Changing Face of Network Storage
As the cost of disk space continues to drop dramatically, network storage technologies have become more affordable and pervasive in networks.  Disks are so large and high speed, that servers can simply mirror two of these larger, faster hard drives in fashions, that used to demand a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID).  Once an organization starts to get beyond three to four servers, there can be great benefits from introducing Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SANs). 

What is Network Storage
Network Storage can be simply disks in a server, but more and more for growing organizations means NAS or SAN technologies.  

Network Attached Storage (NAS) provides one of more disks organized together to be accessible via a network connection, using a file-based connections to share data across the local area network (LAN). These usually offer the shared storage at a lower cost and performance.  

Storage Area Networks (SANs) also provide a shared organization of disks, but the SAN technology enables you to allocate portions of the disk space to individual servers or even desktops.  This arrangement helps centralize disks, improves performance over NAS and break the typical disk capacity limitation of a server's physical space for disks.  Read Case Study 1 of a Fulcrum Group SAN Success Story..  Previous technologies required a higher cost from dealing with Fibre Channel and first generation SAN equipment.  The introduction of the iSCSI protocol, which can leverage standard gigabit based infrastructures, has allowed many more organizations to take advantage.  Current generations of SAN technologies are much easier to use and now offer terabytes of storage at much more affordable prices.

Why is Network Storage important
Networks evolve past their original purposes.  User and shared file stores or Exchange message stores that grow beyond the current physical capacity of installed disks can be easily mounted onto SAN drives presented to a host server.  When data storage was small, a tape backup could easily complete a full backup overnight.  Exponentially growing data, longer work hours and poor compression of Microsoft Exchange message stores, databases, graphics files and Acrobat .PDF files make it much harder to get a full backup during off hours.  

Conducting your initial backup to disks, instead of tapes, can many times return you to conducting a daily full backup.  Read Fulcrum Group SAN Case Study 2 Success Story.  Doing a disk-to-disk backups to a NAS or SAN unit, with standard backup software, also allows you to do restores much quicker.  The restore event is usually when time is most of the essense.   You can take that disk backup and still push it on to tape, to allow you to still maintain an offsite copy, in case of fire or other local disaster.

Business Benefits
The Fulcrum Group can help you take advantage of network storage methods to:

• Get past current server data storage limitations
• Migrate data stores and application data to new hosts
• Structure your storage for planned growth or network changes
• Alleviate backup window issues
• Create more flexible storage for unplanned data growth