We’re all being encouraged to be more graphical, and use less paper all the time. All this tends to mean that the requirement for storage goes up. Storage costs are reducing all the time whilst capacity is increasing, and different ways to connect to storage enclosures are being developed to improve access times.
Obviously there is and will continue to be the directly attached storage such as that found within the desktop device such as the hard disk or one of a number of hard disks residing within your current server.
There however, limitations and sometimes other mass storage solutions are needed. We can of course go on about the technical aspects of the different types of mass storage solutions here but we will just give you a high level summary.
- NAS (Network Attached Storage). A rather simple and elegant mass storage solution to adding storage with various levels of protection to your network.
- SAN (Storage Area Network) An all singing all dancing high speed mass storage solution which is a network in itself. Allowing very high data transfer rates and again multiple levels of protection and management.
- USB (Universal Serial Bus). These would be portable hard disk drives for use as backup devices predominately but also used for storage when connected to single devices.
- Firewire. This is an Apple standard which is known as IEEE 1394 on PC devices. Similar approach to USB based external hard disk drives
- eSATA (external Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). This can be a single disk or an enclosure with multiple disks, but again will connect to your laptop if you have a port.
- Thunderbolt. This connection type offers a massive 10Gb/sec transfer rate. It’s just coming on stream and will revolutionise the use of external storage as well as other things I expect.
Contact us for more information on how we can discuss how to rationalise and fulfill your storage requirements for you.
