Business Storage and Backup: NAS, Server Storage or SAN?
Choose storage by workload, usable capacity, performance, sharing, recovery and growth instead of raw drive size.
Separate primary storage from backup
Primary storage keeps active data available. Backup creates recoverable copies for deletion, corruption, ransomware or system failure. RAID can improve availability after a drive failure, but it is not a backup.
When a NAS may fit
Network-attached storage is commonly used for team file sharing, local backups, media libraries and branch-office data. Evaluate concurrent users, file sizes, permissions, network speed, snapshots and application support—not only total terabytes.
When server-attached storage may fit
Internal or directly attached storage can suit an application or virtualisation host where capacity and performance are closely tied to that server. Expansion options and recovery if the host fails should be understood before purchase.
When shared block storage may fit
SAN platforms serve environments that need shared block storage, higher performance, centralised management or clustered hosts. They add design and operational complexity and should be justified by the application and availability requirements.
Calculate usable capacity
Start with current data, annual growth, snapshots, retention, protection overhead and free-space requirements. Then define performance using workload patterns such as large sequential files, databases or many small files.
Design recovery
Set recovery-point and recovery-time objectives for each dataset. Keep at least one protected copy separate from the primary system and test restores regularly.
Use our server and storage discovery form to share capacity, growth, workload and recovery needs with QuickCart Business.
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