When a company grows, distributed storage or DS (Distributed Storage) shows its limitations and it is necessary to move to the prevailing technologies in the field of video storage. After all, distributed storage does not provide greater protection against machine failures while creating multiple copies of the same file on the network, reducing efficiency and space to create with other projects. Here come to shine shared storage and its children: SAN and NAS.
SAN or Storage Area Network is a shared storage technology that could be defined in simple terms as a subnet, made with fiber optic channels, which is attached to the main network of the office. SAN has clear advantages, such as its high data transmission speed, and the easy scalability and redundancy of its systems, which make it ideal for transmitting to the air.
Some of the existing products on the market in this area are:
Ciprico, which offers SAN solutions with its FibreStore family and the 2212A as its last representative, which provides a data transmission rate of up to 400 MB per second and a storage capacity of up to 1.46 TB.
In this field Avid offers its Mediarry II family based on 2 GB fiber optic channels with a storage capacity of up to 2 TB working with the Avid Unity LANshare and Medianetwork programs to ensure continuous system availability.
Apple's XSan family, which is a file management system with 64-bit processors designed for Mac operating systems, 100% compatible with Final Cut Pro.
Medea, on the other hand, offers its FCR2 and FCR2X disk series, SAN Ready, with 2 GB fiber optic transmission ports and compatible with Windows, Iris and Mac OS X systems.
The near-invulnerability of SAN systems is reflected in their higher cost than that of NAS (Network Attached Storage). Its maintenance is also more complicated and in case of reconfigurations it is likely that the system will have to be knocked down, and here comes into the picture a more economical solution: the NAS. NAS-based systems also offer greater compatibility with other operating systems because they base the transmission of data on Ethernet cards and the TCP/IP protocol, already well known to engineers. While it is true that NAS systems require higher CPU usage than SAN systems, current chips with more than one gigahertz of processing speed can efficiently handle this information without negatively impacting network performance.
An example of a NAS solution is Ciprico's DiMeda family and its DIMeda 1700 and 3600 models, which offer network-wide data transmission rates of 900 MB/s, plus up to 2 TB of storage.
As you can see, both technological creeds have their pros and cons, so the latest trend is to use hybrid storage systems that leave applications on the air for SAN systems and use offline applications for NAS equipment.
In fact, there are already teams that offer an open architecture capable of working with both systems, such as the Profile 6G family and its PVS 3500 and 3000 servers, from Grass Valley, and the NX4000TXS, from Nexio.
Other aspects of information management use data transmission interfaces based on the FireWire protocol, as is the case of Medea's Graid, which won the Making The Cut award at NAB 2004.
In short, all shared storage solutions have a place in the market according to the specific needs of each client, since this is a world in constant evolution that seeks greater cost reduction and high quality of service (QoS) in which, as always, the last word is not said.
What does it mean?
DS
(Distributed Storage) It consists of storing in the client machine all the information with which it is working; in this way, when another user wants to use this information, he copies it over the network and handles it from his station. The good thing is that employees are already familiar with this technology and the existing network infrastructure is used without incurring higher prices.
FF
(Shared Storage) Shared storage is about offering a large storage center rather than many small nodes. Thanks to this it is possible to maintain control of the information in a centralized way, which facilitates its security and avoids the waste of space or multiple copies with different versions.
SAINT
(Storage Are Network)
It can be defined as a large storage center in which the company's servers are connected to each other with a series of high-speed hard drives, all through fiber optics. In other words, it is a high-performance subnet that is used only for storage purposes. Among its great benefits are the ease of scaling, that is, of increasing its capacity, and the minimum use of the computer brain (CPU) for its operations. SANs, in turn, can be centralized or distributed if working across multiple sites.
NAS
(Network Attached Storage)
NAS, a storage system that joins existing LANs in enterprises like any other computer on the network, allows easy access from any other client computer. That is, it is a system with a set of disks and a content management server specialized in handling data packets. Its advantages indicate that they are removed as they are installed: like any other equipment and that they work under a protocol that all engineers handle: TCP / IP.
QoS
(Quality of Service)
It is a certain level of performance established in a network. For example, in today's networks various types of demand are handled, ranging from email and database management, to the transfer of video or audio files; Depending on the needs of businesses, priorities are determined to ensure that the most important applications always have bandwidth available so that there are no transfer delays or file degradation.
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