SAN stands for Storage Area Network and covers a range of devices.

A Storage Area Network is where remote computer storage devices such as disk arrays are attached to servers in a manner that to the operating system these devices appear as locally attached.

Sharing storage enables simplified storage administration and also brings other benefits such as flexibility as cables and storage devices do not have to be physically moved from one server to another.

A SAN environment often incorporates a number of different types of computer hardware, including Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices and RAID systems. Because of its many elements, SAN architectures can be  complex and this can lead to failure which will affect the whole enviorment of the storage system.

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage and covers a range of devices.

Network Attached Storage offers high bandwidth on desktop solutions for business users and provides home users with reliable fault tolerant storage.  NAS devices normally offer RAID level storage in an operating system independent system that is delivered in a package that can be plugged into your network, where it is instantly recognised and useable within minutes.

• Why Are NAS Devices Different to Standard External Storage?

Issues with NAS devices arise due to the fact that the NAS is a closed system.  It appears on the network as a share, normally with a web based admin utility that gives numerous options for configuration, drive information etc, but few understand the underlying technology that is involved in providing the networked storage solution.

Most NAS boxes offer a RAID of some description, in high bandwidth applications this can be a striped RAID 0 array, in more critical environments the device may be set up as a mirrored RAID 1 or even a RAID 5 array.  Some devices are configurable and support more than one method of array configuration.

Examples of NAS Storage include:

• Buffalo - either Terrastation or LinkStation
• Netgear
• Evesham NAS Boxes
• Western Digital Net Centre
• Thecus

ABC Data Recovery are fully able to recover your data from any of these and many other such devices. Call our technicians now in order to gain expert guidance. In most circumstances these can be recovered quickly to minimise the stress of data loss situations. As well as recovery of your data we can convert the data from the file system of the device to NTFS so that it will be useable on a windows platform. Examples of this include:

File system conversion services:

• MFS, HFS (and HFS+) to NTFS
• EXT2/3 to NTFS or HFS +
• ReiserFS to NTFS, HFS+ or EXT3