Storage Area Networks and Networked Storage are actually quite simple concepts to understand as long as you have some basic knowledge of networks and hard drives.

First, you need to understand that a hard drive is the non-volitile mechanics of the computing system that holds the data if the computer is on or off.

Second, if you are familiar with RAID, you understand the core concept of vitalization (every vendor has their own definition).

Next, If you have ever connected to the internet or an internal network, you have the concept of connecting devices through a protocol (in the case of the internet, you are using TCP/IP, it's just a name for a protocol).

Now, if we take the hard drives, add a RAID front end to the group of hard drives, and present them to a specialized network (in the case of a SAN, the protocol is called Fibre Channel) and think of these disks as devices on a special network that are used as data storage to servers, you now understand the basic concept of a SAN.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) isn't too much different, but it does have it's differences.

Please feel free to contact us for a more in depth explaination.