Digital information drives today's business. The volume of information that business users capture and manage grows every day—and often that data needs to be accessed around the clock. The diverse variety of information that IT resources accommodate is fuelling this growth: multimedia files are as commonplace as word processing and spreadsheet files.
As you manage your IT infrastructure, you face critical choices. Do you restrict the type and quantity of information each user stores and accesses, potentially limiting their capability to perform their daily activities? Or, do you continue to invest in more disk drives that you connect exclusively to a single server in a Direct Attached Storage (DAS), consuming countless hours for management and monitoring. Are you beginning to believe that this model can no longer scale to meet your performance and management needs? Is it a poor model that does not scale well when additional data growth requirements happen?
There is another approach. NAS (Network Attached Storage) is flexible, intelligent and manageable. NAS can not only keep up with today's business challenges, it can also evolve to your future needs. A NAS solution can:
•
Be deployed in minutes
•
Reduce the amount of time needed to allocate and manage storage
•
Enable the sharing of storage resources across multiple operating systems and users
•
Support an optimized and tuned file and print solution that you can quickly integrate into your existing IT infrastructure
•
Give you the freedom to remotely manage your storage with a standard Web browser
This guide will provide you with a basic introduction to NAS, help you evaluate NAS technologies, and better understand how they can meet your storage needs. For a comprehensive overview of HP's adaptive approach to all your data storage needs including NAS, SAN, and data backup, visit HP Simply StorageWorks
The sections of the guide include:
•
Inside a NAS: Learn more about the inner workings of a NAS
Printable version
