One of the biggest (and most important) operations for your business is data storage. From website files, mobile applications to backing up company data, it is important to have the right storage solution for your business. Above all else, your confidential information needs to be secure at all times. If you have a large amount of physical files in your office, you could look into using secure offsite storage facilities. Such buildings are seismically engineered and internally designed to restrict access. Everything from the rack layout, pathways, and lighting are calculated to minimize risk.
If storing data is one of your biggest headaches, this article is for you. We have discussed different storage types that will help you store your business’ data better.
Have a look at the below three data storage types.
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
DAS is directly connected to your computer and is faster than external hard drives are. In addition, it takes less power too! Since DAS are portable, they’re great for back-ups or backup of heavy graphics files and video files. The ideal DAS storage should be able to hold a whole dataset or major portions of it. The hard drives could be a regular HDD or SSD.
Advantages
The biggest advantage of direct-attached storage (DAS) is that you can store as much data on it as you want.
Moreover, DAS is budget-friendly. You can get up to 6TB of storage for under a hundred dollars.
Disadvantages
The disadvantage of this drive is the speed of data transfer will be limited by the current bandwidth of the connection.
Moreover, DAS may not be a convenient data storage option for small-to-big businesses anymore. How can you expect your employees to run places with big hard drives looking to plug them into a system to extract data?
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a network-accessible storage device that provides data access to heterogeneous clients or businesses over various network protocols.
Accessing data on a network-attached storage device is similar to accessing data on any other device or file server on a network. The NAS devices are typically implemented as an array of hard disk drives installed into standard computer chassis.
The early NAS devices typically used SCSI or IDE drives; however, SATA drives have become more common in more recent years.
Advantages
Once you have assigned a NAS to an employee, they can easily keep all these files under control. However, in an organization, multiple employees can use multiple servers.
This can become difficult to manage the files as a manager because you don’t have a centralized area that only you can access. If two employees are saving data on the same computer, there’s a good chance the two files will overwrite each other if one employee saves their file after the other has already saved theirs. This is where Network Attached Storage comes in handy by keeping your network organized and making sure the data is not lost for either person.
You can also clone the data with NAS and take its backup.
Disadvantages
Speed and performance are important elements for any network. NAS slows down as multiple users are using it at the same time. Moreover, the only way to boost its performance is by adding another NAS. However, it complicates the network (NAS Sprawl), leading to data losses at times and exhaustive maintenance.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
SANs provide block-level access to consolidated data storage. It also provides the ability to create a network of storage devices that can be accessed over a network by multiple hosts.
The various storage devices under SAN are typically connected via Fibre Channel or iSCSI networks.
With a storage area network, you can have redundant and high-speed access to data and volume, anywhere from a single system to a multi-system configuration. This flexibility makes SANs ideal for multi-server applications and large servers. The Fiber Channel SAN is the most common type of SAN with several variations. It is often called Fibre Channel SANs (FC-SAN).
Final Word
Storing data is one of the crucial elements of a business’s growth. Understanding how to do it right can lead to better storage management.
Apart from the three storage types discussed in this article, you can also leverage the services of a reliable application management provider for better IT application management.
