IBM enables companies to address their storage issues by providing cost-effective data storage solutions that fit each organization’s needs. These solutions can support multiple platforms and product vendors and help enhance protection for critical business data and increase asset utilization, availability, and reliability levels with low management cost.
Centralized data
Network attached storage, or NAS, is shared storage attached to a local area network. A NAS server is a storage appliance that consists of a high performance file server that plugs into a LAN. Unlike a general-purpose server, such as a Unix®, Linux® or Windows® server, a NAS server is a specialized appliance optimized for file serving, i.e., storing, retrieving, and serving files in a heterogeneous protocol environment. The power of a NAS solution is that, in an environment with many servers running different operating systems with fragmented storage islands, storage of data can be centralized onto a NAS device, as can the security, management, and backup of the data.
NAS was developed to address problems with direct attached storage (DAS), which included the effort required to administer and maintain "server farms", and the lack of scalability, reliability, availability, and performance. NAS offers significant ease of use, providing heterogeneous data sharing and helping organizations automate and simplify their data management.
Advantages of NAS
One of the big advantages of NAS is expandability. If your small business needs more network storage space, simply add another NAS device and expand the available storage. NAS also brings an extra level of fault tolerance to the network. In a DAS environment, a server going down means that the data that server holds is no longer available. NAS is designed to help keep data available on the network and accessible by clients. Fault tolerance measures can be used to help keep the NAS device from becoming a point of failure.
The IBM® System Storage™ N series products are designed to provide network attached storage for storage environments where customers have a need for storing mission-critical data, near-line storage, and WORM-protected data in high-availability, high-capacity, and highly secure environments. All N series systems utilize a single operating system across the entire platform. The N series products provide a wide range of network attachment capabilities to a broad range of host and client systems. These products use a multitude of network access protocols, including file system protocols (CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP) and block I/O protocols (iSCSI and FCP).
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Storage product guide
Browse the product guide comparing all of IBM System Storage® products