Using SANs and NAS

By W. Curtis Preston and W Curtis Preston

Book Overview

Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and modern data centers have extremely demanding requirements for size, speed, and reliability. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) allow organizations to manage and back up huge file systems quickly, thereby keeping their lifeblood flowing. W. Curtis Preston's insightful book takes you through the ins and outs of building and managing large data centers using SANs and NAS.

As a network administrator you're aware that multi-terabyte data stores are common and petabyte data stores are starting to appear. Given this much data, how do you ensure that it is available all the time, that access times and throughput are reasonable, and that the data can be backed up and restored in a timely manner? SANs and NAS provide solutions that help you work through these problems, with special attention to the difficulty of backing up huge data stores.

This book explains the similarities and differences of SANs and NAS to help you determine which, or both, of these complementing technologies are appropriate for your network. Using SANs, for instance, is a way to share multiple devices (tape drives and disk drives) for storage, while NAS is a means for centrally storing files so they can be shared. Preston exams each technology with a vendor neutral approach, starting with the building blocks of a SAN and how they can be assembled for effective storage solutions. He covers day-to-day management and backup and recovery for both SANs and NAS in detail.

Whether you're a seasoned storage administrator or a network administrator charged with taking on this role, you'll find all the information you need to make informed architecture and data management decisions. The book fans out to explore technologies such as RAID and other forms of monitoring that will help complement your data center. With an eye on the future, other technologies that might affect the architecture and management of the data center are explored. This is sure to be an essential volume in any network administrator's or storage administrator's library.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596001533
• ISBN13: 9780596001537
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 222 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great book on the theory of NAS and SAN

I found this book to be very helpful in sorting out the differences between the two technologies that have started to blur in many ways. I read this book from cover to cover and the layout was great. The book starts with a good overview of the past technologies that most IT people know and then begins to compair them to NAS and SAN and shows how those old technologies are evolving to fit into the new design. As someone who has not had exposure to Fiber Channel hands on the book did a great job of explaining the technology and what part it plays. It gives a real nuts and bolts explination of the peices and what they all do. The book then goes into describing SAN. It gives some typical uses along with the advantages and even the disavantages of SAN. In the next chapter it describes one of the major advantages to SAN in terms of Backup and Recovery. It doesn't go into detail and tell you what the commands are to do these things but more what you need to get the job done and what role each part plays. The next three chapters are on NAS. The first one gives an overview of NAS and goes into uses along with the advantages and disadvantages of it. The second chapter gives information on how to manage NAS and is a bit too specific but does give a good foundation for the things that you need to look for to get the most out of NAS. The thirst chapter is on Backup and Recovery in a NAS environment. It gives a good overview of the technologies that exist but again gets into a little too much detail and is hung up on specific technologies. Overall I would suggest this book to any IT people who have a solid background in server and network technology but are looking for what storage solutions exist and how they can be leveraged.

Great book on san / nas concepts

This book is really good at bringing together a lot of different details together having it make sense. It has been a couple of years since I worked on SANs and reading this book really refreshed the concepts for me. W. Curtis Preston's writing style is very easy to follow as he usually adds in insightful side items to break up the book a bit. I was expecting a very well written book as I also read his backup & recovery book which I really enjoyed too. I reccomend this book to anyone who is starting to investigate san or nas solutions or wants to get a good solid starting point with those technologies.

A balanced book on NAS and SAN

I found this to be an excellent introductory book on SAN and NAS. The book is divided equally between the two technologies. I certainly recommend it for any one who wants to get into network storage technology.

Very Good treatment of the subject

If you are looking for a very concise examination of SAN and NAS technologies, this is the right book. While it is a fraction of the size of some other books on the topic, it is a to-the-point treatment of the major architectural components of each.There is a lot of foundation info that is somewhat assumed and reviewed briefly, but the killer chapters are on backup and restore methodologies around these technologies.This is not a disk array or fibre-channel switch product guide nor does it explain every last detail of SCSI commands. But if the need is to understand these technologies and their place in your infrastructure, this is a good work.Well worth the purchase price.