SAN Advantages

1. Share storage among different application servers.

2. Data is stored at a block level.

3. Physical elements of the SAN (servers, switches, storage arrays, etc.) are connected with Fibre Channel.

4. SAN is both scalability and flexibility.

5. Storage can be added without disrupting the applications and the different types of storage can be added to the pool.

6. Backups are centralized due to reducing workload and also providing greater assurance that the backups are complete.

7. Backup traffic never impacts users on the LAN.

ISCSI SAN Advantages

1) ISCSI is a lower cost alternative to Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure.

2) Interconnect is ethernet cable and the switches are Gigabit ethernet.

3) Protocol used is TCP/IP.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) Advantages

1) NAS accesses data by file . 2) NAS manages its own file system.

3) NAS can be accessed across multiple operating systems.

4) NAS backups are more efficient. (With NAS feature called Snapshot provides an almost instantaneous way for the systems administrator to recover lost, deleted or corrupted files.)

5) Administrators can assign shares and security settings as they would for a regular file server.