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.
