Storage

A storage appliance is a stand-alone computing device or virtual machine (VM) image used to move data from a local site to a remote storage service provider. Such appliances are used for primary, backup and archive data.

A NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliance is a type of commodity hardware that includes its own dedicated storage disks and RAID that can easily scale as more capacity is needed. NAS appliances help businesses protect corporate data, enable file-sharing among employees and remote connectivity.

Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools. The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company.

A SAN (Storage Area Network) is a high-speed sub network of shared storage devices. A SAN’s architecture works in a way that makes all storage devices available to all servers on a LAN or WAN. As more storage devices are added to a SAN, they too will be accessible from any server in the larger network.

Storage area networks (SANs) and network attached storage (NAS) both provide networked storage solutions. A NAS is a single storage device that operates on data files, while a SAN is a local network of multiple devices. … However, the two are sometimes used together to form what’s known as a unified SAN.