Richard Scannell on choosing SAN or NAS

Richard Scannell VP, GlassHouse Technologies Inc., GlassHouse Technologies Inc. Richard Scannell, co-founder of GlassHouse, serves as Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy. In his role, Richard is responsible for the development and execution of corporate strategy, client relationship development and marketing communications. Richard is a frequently requested speaker at key industry events, as well as a featured columnist and thought leader in such publications as STORAGE Magazine, Intelligent Enterprise and Byte and Switch. Richard has also written various articles in STORAGE magazine, including "How healthy is your corporate e-mail?" and "The well-oiled backup machine."

QUESTION: Given the direction of the storage technology, what would be your recommendation on choosing either NAS or SAN for a consolidated enterprise storage solution capable of supporting mainframes, open systems and RDBMs?

ANSWER: First of all, it's important to understand the attributes of the data -DBMs vs. file services, large vs. small file, etc. This will initially point in a direction of SAN vs. NAS. Secondly there are tradeoffs of performance against complexity where it is clearly a less daunting task to deploy NAS boxes over SANs. Given the small amount of information provided (open system, mainframe and RDBMs), the initial direction would suggest SAN but I recommend you develop a much stronger requirements statement before moving to vendor questioning.