NAS (Network-attached storage )

• NAS is a file system attached to the network that acts solely as a storage center.
• NAS computers have all of the standard components of a computer such as a CPU, RAM, and hard drive but instead of acting in the traditional server fashion, they act solely to hold data.
• NAS systems usually contain one or more hard disks, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAIDs (redundant arrays of independant disks), as do traditional file servers.

 

Advantages of NAS:

1)Availability of data can potentially be increased with NAS because data access is not dependent on a server. The server can be down and users will still have access to data on the NAS.

2)Performance can be increased by NAS because the file serving is done by the NAS and not done by a server responsible for also doing other processing.

3)Scalability of NAS is not limited by the number of internal or external ports of a server's data bus, as a NAS device can be connected to any available network jack.

4)NAS can be more reliable than DAS (Direct Attached Storage) because it separates the storage from the server. If the server fails, there is unlikely to be file system corruption.

5)NAS unit does not limit clients to only one file transfer protocol.