Network Attached Storage Essay

Submitted By galaviz6151
Words: 565
Pages: 3

A Network Attached Storage device, or a NAS device, is a “type of dedicated file storage device that provides local area network or LAN users with centralized, consolidated disk storage through a standard Ethernet connection.” (Rouse, n.d.) Each of these devices are connected to the local area network as a network device as itself and given an IP address. The main advantage to one of these devices is that it’s “not limited to the storage capacity of the computing device or the number of disk in a local server.” (Rouse, n.d.) These device do have enough disk to support RAID, and many appliances can be connected to the network to expand the storage. The NSA device runs strictly through the OS or operating system, it doesn’t have a keyboard or a display. The speed of the network adapter available on a NAS device really depends on how much you have to spend. The most popular being the GigE NAS adapter it’s fairly cheap and have two separate gigabit Ethernet connections. The older ones only had 100 Mbit. The capacity range for NAS devices really depends on the “type and volume of content you want to store, there’s a choice of capacities available all the way up to huge multiple terabyte versions” (dabs.com, n.d.) Say for example you want to store 50,000 songs and hundreds of hours of videos, a 160 GB capacity would be need, but if you go further and have high definition video you’re going to need a bigger capacity. There are fault tolerances such as RAID as I mentioned in the beginning, built into these devices. “ The growing capacity of Network Attached Storage appliances and the importance of the information stored on them makes it important to consider fault tolerant architectures for at least some NAS as well” (Cook, n.d.) NAS devices can hold up to several terabytes of storage and have important responsibilities like jobs of corporate mail servers that can hurt the company if it is compromised. For example a company ”Procom Technology recently came up with the NetForce 3000 series of NAS appliances that include dual active controllers, redundant