NAS stands for Network Attached Storage, which means “network attached storage,” “network attached storage,” or, as it is called according to its functional purpose, “data storage server” or “NAS server.”
People often buy a NAS server simply as some kind of external storage without knowing exactly what it is. In addition, if someone already knew what NAS was about five years ago, then a lot has changed since then. Now cloud storage is becoming increasingly popular – with the increase in the amount of content to be stored, which should always be at hand, the idea of having an “own piece of the cloud” at home or in the office that can be accessed from the outside seems to be more and more attractive.
Therefore, now the NAS server can be called its own storage device, which can be accessed via the Internet.
Like any portable drive (USB flash drive or USB hard drive), NAS performs the function of storing data (documents, pictures, music, videos, etc.) with access to them as needed. However, unlike USB devices, NAS allows access not only from the computer to which it is connected but also via the Internet using network technologies: Wi-Fi, mobile network, or others.
NAS Server Functions
A network NAS server is not just a collection of hard drives that can be accessed remotely. It also has a number of functions that have appeared and developed in the process of digital transformation. NAS now comes with powerful CPUs and operating systems to help organize and automate data management on the NAS.
Using a NAS allows you to protect data on different devices on the network from loss, natural disasters, etc. Therefore, the NAS provides the following:
- Reservation of up-to-date data from all user devices in the network, both mobile and fixed.
- Organization of all media files, documents, and other data in a more visual form, with easy access from any network device.
- Manage access to different data for different users working on the network.
- Deployment of web and mail servers, which means that you can organize personal or corporate mail with an unlimited number of mailboxes on the NAS server, as well as deploy a corporate website on the NAS server.
- Gaining access to data from various computer platforms: iOS, Windows, Android, access to the management of the server itself, as well as communication between different NAS servers.
- Various options for constant data synchronization between devices and between network NAS servers, if there are several of them on the network. This way, you can ensure the complete safety of all current data.
- A common information hub between data from devices of different platforms, such as Mac and Windows, which are usually not good friends with each other.
And these are not all the features you can get from the NAS server.
What Is Network Storage Used For?
NAS allows users to collaborate and share data more effectively, especially for workgroups that are located remotely or in different time zones. The NAS connects to a wireless router, making it easy to access files and folders in distributed work environments from any device connected to the network. Organizations typically deploy a NAS environment as the foundation for a personal or private cloud.
There are NAS products designed for use in large enterprises, as well as for home offices or small businesses. Devices typically contain at least two drive bays, although single-bay systems are available for non-critical data. An enterprise NAS is designed with many high-performance processing features to make storage management easy and typically has at least four drive bays.
Before the advent of NAS, businesses had to set up and manage many separate file servers. To increase storage capacity, NAS devices are equipped with more or larger drives — called scale-out NAS — or clustered together to scale up.
In addition, most NAS vendors partner with cloud storage providers to provide customers with backup flexibility.
Network storage uses hard drives to store data. Performance issues can arise when too many users overload the system with requests at the same time. Newer NAS software free use fast flash drives, either in combination with conventional hard drives or in all-flash configurations.
NAS Use Cases
The type of hard disk that you select for NAS is determined by the applications you are using. Sharing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Word documents with colleagues is a common task, as are periodic data backups.
Using a NAS to handle large volumes of streaming media files requires larger disk capacities and speeds, more storage, and more powerful network processing.
At home, people often use a NAS system to store and process multimedia files, security system data, and other Internet (IoT) devices to automate backups.
In an enterprise, a NAS can become backup storage for archiving and disaster recovery (DR). If the NAS has server functionality, it can also serve email, media files, databases, or print jobs.
Some higher-end NAS products fit enough drives to support RAID for increased performance, high availability, and redundancy.
Key Benefits of NAS
NAS is an easily expandable storage and synchronization space available to all users on an office or home network. Instead of adding memory to each user’s device, you can organize one shared storage for everyone, and each user will use as much space in it as he needs.
The network NAS server is your own cloud storage. All employees can have remote access to the NAS, their data in the storage will always be available remotely and, at the same time, protected from loss if the local equipment fails.
It allows you to provide automatic backup and reliable protection against data loss, even if one of the device’s hard drives fails.
NAS servers can directly stream data to game consoles, TVs, speakers, and other media devices.
The NAS server can use container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), further increasing storage efficiency and data availability.
The Future of NAS
Over time, the basic functionality of NAS devices has expanded to support virtualization. High-performance NAS products can also support data deduplication, flash storage, multiprotocol access, and replication.
Some NAS devices run a standard OS, such as Microsoft Windows, while others may run a vendor’s proprietary OS. While IP is the most common transfer protocol, some midrange NAS products may support NFS, IPX, NetBIOS, and SMB.
For NAS scale-out, the storage administrator installs larger drives and more drives to increase storage capacity. Scaling provides the flexibility to adapt to your organization’s business needs. Scalable enterprise NAS systems can store billions of files without the performance penalty associated with metadata lookups.
