Survey on Recent Technology of Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage Protocols

Abstract: With the increasing requirement for large storage repositories, network storage has become important for large data storage. Huge amounts of new data are generated by humans every year. Humans and applications use data in various format including texts, video, audio and images. It is very much vital to the network storage system that should be high capacity, high availability and scalable. With the help of SAN and NAS, storage can be efficiently utilized. Both technologies alleviate the need to eliminate direct attached storage to aid more flexible storage access. SAN and NAS use open industry-standard network protocols to provide storage facility. NAS uses the NFS and CIFS protocol and SAN uses the iSCSI, FCP and FCoE protocols to provide the storage facility. This paper provides the basics and survey on new technologies of these protocols.

Keywords: NAS (Network Attached Storage), SAN(Storage Area Network), iSCSI(internet small Computer System Interface), FCP (Fibre Channel Protocol) , CIFS(Common Internet File System), FCoE(Fibre channel over Ethernet), reliability, multipathing, disaster tolerance.