Everyday, you hear buzzwords and acronyms, you read about them on the internet or in a trade magazine with a vendor spin put on them. We can help you decipher what these terms really mean.
DAS = Direct Attached Storage – A disk that is directly connected to the server
NAS = Network Attached Storage – A disk that is shared from another server or servers over TCP/IP
SAN = Storage Area Network – A disk that is shared to a server or a clustered set of servers over Fibre Channel
RAID = A grouping of physical disks acting as one single logical disk
SCSI = Small Computer Standard Interface – A protocol (key word PROTOCOL) that is used for high performance disks, that just happened to be called SCSI disks
SAS = Serial Attached SCSI - The serial version of the SCSI protocol
SATA = Serial Advanced Technology Attachment – A serial version of the ATA or IDE protocol (also a disk type)
iSCSI = Internet SCSI – Encapsulating the SCSI protocol into TCP/IP Packets