Types of Storage Configurations

A Storage configuration can be set up using a number of host systems, disk drives, controller cards etc. There are 3 broad divisions of how all these components are arranged/connected to form a whole system.
Instead of defining these, I would rather give an example of each kind of configuration. This is the way I distinguish different storage systems.

1. DAS or Direct attached storage.
The simplest example would be the hard drive attached to your personal computer. The hard drive is directly connected to your mother board through some kind of cable. Normal PCs have SATA disks so the connecting cables are basically SATA cables. You can get an info of what SATA is on the net, or wait till I put in another blog.

2. NAS or Network Attached Storage.
An example would be the web servers you use everyday for your office e-mail. Some LAN connection connects you to the web server and your e-mails etc gets stored in that web server. This is one of the most popular form of storage configurations in use.

2. SAN or Storage Area Network
SAN is a separate network setup to serve only storage devices and servers.
SANs are primarily used in large scale, high performance enterprise storage operations. For example, the way a music portal can maintain all its web contents in its servers. SAN are not only a configuration but an entire business solution in itself.

In following blogs we will see a more detailed view of each type of these configurations with a picture aided view of their architecture.