NAS vs. SAN Performance?

[Rajesh Behal]

NAS vs. SAN Performance?

[Dipsy Jones]

A storage-area network (SAN) organizes storage resouces on an independent, high-performance network. The key distinction between NAS and SANs is that network-attached storage handles input/output (I/O) requests for individual files, whereas a storage-area network manages I/O requests for contiguous blocks of data.

Today, some SANs can transport data over a standard Ethernet connection, but most often storage area networks use the Fibre Channel protocol, which was developed specifically for high-speed data transport on storage-area networks.