NAS Last Update Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 1

Objectives of This Section Learn –What NAS is –How to use a NAS device in a LAN Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 2

What is a NAS NAS is Network Attached Storage In this approach data drives are taken out of the server that holds the network operating system They are deployed in a box that runs a proprietary operating system that just understands serving up data Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 3

What is a NAS This box is entirely independent of the server’s operating system or the server itself Small NAS boxes is an easy and quick way to add storage to an existing network It can also be used to provide common storage to a small network without the bother of supporting a full network operating system such as Windows Server Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 4

What is NAS These boxes only do one thing, serve up data As such they can do this very fast For large installations these devices go up to a terabyte in size Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 5

Why is a NAS Used In a standard server based network all of the storage is in the servers This can produce several problems as the network grows First, all of the storage space is in discrete pools One of these can run out of space while another has too much space Adjusting between these is not easy Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 6

Why is a NAS Used Second, sharing data across platforms is difficult, as the various operating systems cannot directly talk to each other When NAS devices are included all or part of the storage is now in the NAS boxes These devices are attached directly to the LAN Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 7

Why is a NAS Used These devices require no licenses to use them, unlike the traditional server operating systems Further if you run out of storage space again, just plug in another NAS box Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 8

A NAS Box Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 9

Small v Large NAS A small NAS box is a standalone device that can be purchased at an office supply store A gateway type of NAS is used to create a much larger set of shared storage devices directly attached to the local area network this time through a NAS gateway device Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 10

Network or Internet Appliances Sometimes these types of boxes are called network or internet appliances instead of the more general term NAS When they are called this it is usually meant to relate to a special purpose NAS doing something other than general storage Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 11

Network or Internet Appliances Such as –Web server –Mail server –Firewall –Caching It does not matter what they are called as long as you understand what they are meant to do Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 12

Problems with a NAS NAS boxes use file oriented rather than the faster block oriented protocols to access information As such in some low speed LANs the protocols used, such as NFS, CIFS, or HTTP over TCP/IP can cause bottlenecks for high data transfer application such as databases Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 13

Problems with a NAS These are not the quickest protocols As such they can introduce some latency into the process In most cases this can be solved by throwing bandwidth at it Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 14

Lab Let’s find a NAS box Copyright Kenneth N. Chipps Ph.D. 15