Datacenter storage technology has three main flavors:
- Direct Attached Storage (DAS): This is the traditional storage solution, where disks are attached directly to servers. Access is generally arbitrated by an intelligent controller.
- Network Attached Storage (NAS): Here storage is essentially at a filesystem level and is shared between multiple servers using some sort of networking protocol. The remote filesystem is "mounted" at a specific location in the server operating system's filesystem tree. Two common NAS protocols are NFS (Network File System) and CIFS (Common Internet File System). CIFS requires a dedicated separate storage server which all of the other servers to connect in order to access the data. Besides allowing for ...