SAN Insights | Sumble

What is SAN?

A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a dedicated high-speed network that connects servers to storage devices. It provides block-level access to storage, allowing multiple servers to share storage resources as if they were directly attached. SANs are commonly used in environments requiring high performance, high availability, and scalability for storage, such as databases, virtualization, and large file servers.

Find organizations using SAN on Sumble →

What other technologies are related to SAN?

SAN Competitor Technologies

NAS

NAS (Network Attached Storage) provides file-level access over a network, while SAN provides block-level access. They are often considered alternatives for storage solutions.

mentioned alongside SAN in 72% (16.2k) of relevant job posts

NFS

NFS (Network File System) is a file-level network protocol, often considered an alternative to SAN, similar to NAS.

mentioned alongside SAN in 17% (3.4k) of relevant job posts

DAS

DAS (Direct-Attached Storage) is storage that is directly connected to a server, without a network in between. It's a simpler and often cheaper alternative to SAN, but it lacks the scalability and sharing capabilities of SAN.

mentioned alongside SAN in 24% (1.2k) of relevant job posts

CIFS

CIFS (Common Internet File System) is a file sharing protocol used in network file systems, and thus competes with the block level approach of SAN.

mentioned alongside SAN in 20% (1k) of relevant job posts

vSAN

vSAN is VMware's software-defined storage solution that creates a SAN from local server storage. It's a competitor to traditional hardware-based SANs.

mentioned alongside SAN in 13% (1.1k) of relevant job posts

Object Storage

Object Storage is a storage architecture that manages data as objects rather than as block storage (SAN) or file storage (NAS). Object storage is an alternative to SAN for unstructured data and cloud-native applications.

mentioned alongside SAN in 22% (608) of relevant job posts

SAN Complementary Technologies

iSCSI

iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) is a protocol that enables the transport of SCSI commands over an IP network. It is a common protocol used to access storage on a SAN.

mentioned alongside SAN in 34% (3.7k) of relevant job posts

RAID

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. It is frequently used within a SAN.

mentioned alongside SAN in 35% (2.6k) of relevant job posts

VMware

VMware uses SAN for virtual machine storage, as SAN provides a robust and scalable storage solution for virtualized environments.

mentioned alongside SAN in 5% (15.3k) of relevant job posts