Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and modern data centers have extremely demanding requirements for size, speed, and reliability. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) allow organizations to manage and back up huge file systems quickly, thereby keeping their lifeblood flowing. W. Curtis Preston's insightful book takes you through the ins and outs of building and managing large data centers using SANs and NAS.

As a network administrator you're aware that multi-terabyte data stores are common and petabyte data stores are starting to appear. Given this much data, how do you ensure that it is available all the time, that access times and throughput are reasonable, and that the data can be backed up and restored in a timely manner? SANs and NAS provide solutions that help you work through these problems, with special attention to the difficulty of backing up huge data stores.

This book explains the similarities and differences of SANs and NAS to help you determine which, or both, of these complementing technologies are appropriate for your