Network Attached Storage (NAS) is the name given to a storage technology dedicated to sharing the storage capacity of a computer (server) with personal computers or clients over a network (usually TCP/IP), making use of an optimized operating system to give access to CIFS, NFS, FTP, or TFTP protocols.
NAS systems are storage devices that are accessed from computers using network protocols (usually TCP/IP). A NAS system could also be considered a server (Microsoft Windows, Linux, etc.) that shares its drives over the network, but the definition usually applies to specific systems.
NAS communications protocols are file-based, so the client requests the entire file from the server and handles it locally, so they are geared towards handling a large number of small files. The protocols used are file sharing protocols such as Network File System (NFS) or Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS).
Many NAS systems have one or more storage devices to increase their total capacity. Frequently, these devices are arranged in RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) or redundant storage containers.
NAS Apps
NAS is very useful for providing centralized storage to client computers in environments with large amounts of data. NAS can enable systems easily and at low cost with load balancing, fault tolerance and web server to provide storage services. The potential market growth for NAS is the consumer market where there are large amounts of multimedia data.
The price of NAS applications has dropped, offering flexible storage networks for the home consumer with lower costs than normal, with USB or FireWire external drives.
Some of these solutions available for NAS are:
- Local and remote backup and restore
- Private Cloud
- File Sharing
- iSCSI volumes
- Web server
- Print Server
- VPN Server
- Virtualization