NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

>NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.