Storage Techniques:

DAS RAID NAS SAN

By :
Ben Ghorbel Med Aymen
Ghrab Ilyes
Hamdi Firas
Jamoui Achref
Plan
1. Introduction
2. RAID
3. DAS
4. NAS
5. SAN
6. Conclusion
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INTRODUCTION (1/2)

Everyone knows that the global appetite for data storage is growing at an

astonishing rate, that's why traditional storage devices are being not longer

reliable in terms of cost, capacity and capability.

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INTRODUCTION (2/2)
What is a logical drive?

•is a group of physical

disks that appears to
your OS as a single
drive.
•can comprise one or more disks drives and can use part or all of each disk’s
drive capacity.
•it is possible to include the same disk drive in two different logical drives by
using just a portion of the space on the disk drive in each.
The combination of multiple disk drive components into a logical
unit are made by the mean of a storage technology : RAID 4
2. RAID

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RAID

The basic idea of RAID was to combine multiple, small inexpensive disks

drive into an array of disk drives which yields performance exceeding that of

a Single, Large Expensive Drive(SLED).

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ADVANTAGES OF RAID
Using a RAID storage subsystem has the following advantages:
•Redundancy:
• Provides fault-tolerance by mirroring or parity operation.
• Provides disk spanning by weaving all connected drives into one single volume.

•Increased Performance: Increases disk access speed by breaking data into

several blocks when reading/writing to several drives in parallel. With RAID,
storage speed increases as more drives are added.
•Lower Costs:
• Acquiring costs
• Management costs: Floor space Costs, Operational Risk, Lowering Power and Cooling
Costs.

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FEW TERMS TO UNDERSTAND
• Data Striping: Data is split across multiple drives in a RAID array to form a single logical
storage unit. Each drive's storage space is partitioned into stripes, ranging in size from one
sector (512 bytes) to multiple megabytes.

• Mirroring: Used in RAID levels 1 and 1+0 for data recovery. Data is duplicated through
mirroring across two disks. If one drive fails, the data remains available on the other
disk.

• Parity: Information Used in RAID levels 3, 4 and 5 for data recovery. In the event of a drive
failure, parity information can be combined with the other remaining data to regenerate the
missing information.

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RAID LEVELS

•Data are distributed across the array of disk drives.

•Redundant disk capacity is used to store parity information, which

guarantees data recoverability in case of a disk failure.

•Levels decided according to schemes to provide redundancy at lower cost

by using striping and “parity” bits.

•Different cost-performance trade-offs.

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RAID 0 : DISK STRIPPING

•Minimum Disks Required=2

•Capacity=N 
•Redundancy=No 
RAID 0 provides the highest performance but no redundancy.
Data in the logical drive is striped (distributed) across several physical drives.
 Performing simultaneous writes
 High-Performance applications where data loss is not critical

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RAID 1: DISK MIRRORING
•Minimum Disks Required=2
•Capacity=N/2 
•Redundancy=Yes 
RAID 1 mirrors the data stored in one hard drive to another.
RAID 1 can only be performed with two hard drives.
If there are more than two hard drives, RAID (0+1) will be performed
automatically.
 Performing simultaneous reads
 High Reliability with fast recovery

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RAID 0+1: DISK STRIPPING WITH
MIRRORING
•Minimum Disk Required=4 
•Capacity=N/2 
•Redundancy=Yes 
RAID (0+1) combines RAID 0 and RAID 1 - Mirroring and Striping. RAID
(0+1) allows multiple drive failure because of the full redundancy of the hard
drives. If there are more than two hard drives assigned to perform RAID 1,
RAID (0+1) will be performed automatically.
RAID 10 is a good choice for general data storage, including serving
as a startup drive, and as storage for large files, such as multimedia.
Both performance and reliability are important, e.g. in small
databases

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RAID 3: DISK STRIPING WITH DEDICATED
PARITY DISK

•Minimum Disk Required=3

•Capacity=N-1
•Redundancy=Yes 
RAID 3 performs Block Striping with Dedicated Parity.
One drive member is dedicated to storing the parity data.
When a drive member fails, the controller can recover/ regenerate the lost
data of the failed drive from the dedicated parity drive.
RAID 3 is usually used storing large files, such as multimedia, music,
videos, and photos. Performance for writing or reading files larger than
1 MB is dramatically better than in a single-drive, non-RAID system.
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RAID 5: STRIPING WITH INTERSPERSED
PARITY

•Minimum Disk Required=3

•Capacity=N-1
•Redundancy=Yes 
RAID 5 is similar to RAID 3 but the parity data is not stored in one dedicated
hard drive. Parity information is interspersed across the drive array.
In the event of a failure, the controller can recover/regenerate the lost data of
the failed drive from the other surviving drives.
RAID 5 is a good choice for multimedia file storage. Its read speed
can be very high, while the write speed is slightly slower, due to the
need to calculate and distribute the parity.

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FEW TERMS TO
UNDERSTAND
•Snapshots: comes in three basic flavors: File system based, subsystem
based and volume manager/virtualization based. All three are considerably
different. Snapshots are an extremely important function for business
continuity, but there are a lot of details to work through. You need a strategy
for snapshots as well as a decent understanding of how you will establish
operations to work with them. They will change your daily operations and
they require constant, ongoing administration. Platform specific operations
for flushing cache (file system buffers) matter a whole lot.
•Replication: is the transport of data objects (files -- tables) over a TCP/IP
network. The transfer is made from system to system not between storage
devices or subsystems.

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3. DAS

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DAS

•DAS (Direct Attached Storage) is an architecture for which the storage is

“privately” attached to the servers: cannot be shared, it is hard to scale,
expensive and complex to manage. 80% of the market it is still DAS
•For an individual computer user, the hard drive is the usual form of direct-
attached storage. In an enterprise, providing for storage that can be shared
by multiple computers and their users tends to be more efficient and easier
to manage.

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4. NAS

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NAS 1/2

•NAS is file-level computer data storage connected to an IP network providing

data access to a heterogeneous group of clients.
•NAS removes the responsibility of file serving from other servers on the
network. They typically provide access to files using network file sharing
protocols such as NFS (popular on UNIX systems), SMB/CIFS (Server
Message Block/Common Internet File System) (used with MS Windows
systems), AFP (used with Apple Macintosh computers), or NCP (used with
OES and Novell NetWare).

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NAS 2/2


•Easy appliance
•Clustered file-system
•NAS units rarely limit clients to a single protocol


•Not recommended for applications requiring large disk performance
•Heavy usage of CPU

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2. SAN

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SAN 1/2

•A Storage Area Network (SAN) is an independent network for storage

subsystems, free from the rest of the computer network.
•SAN is a dedicated network that provides access to consolidated, block level
data storage.
•It's a networked architecture that provides I/O connectivity between hosts
and storage devices.
•SAN devices: hubs, switches, servers and storage devices implements a
storage resource environment.

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SAN 2/2

The storage network can be:

•A Fiber Channel network
• Uses a network of Fiber Channel connectivity devices: FC Switches and
Directors
• For transport, an FC SAN uses FCP
• FCP is serial SCSI-3 over Fiber Channel

•Or an IP network
• Uses standard LAN infrastructure: Ethernet switches
• For transport, an IP SAN uses iSCSI
• iSCSI is serial SCSI-3 over IP

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STORAGE ARRAY

•The concept of a logical volume is very similar to a logical drive. A logical

volume is composed of one or several logical drives, the member logical
drives can be the same RAID level or different RAID levels.
•The logical volume can be divided into a maximum of 8 partitions. During
operation, the host sees a non-partitioned logical volume or a partition of a
partitioned logical volume as one single physical drive.
•A Volume Group (VG) is the highest level abstraction used within the Logical
Volume Manager. It gathers together a collection of Logical Volumes (LV)
and Physical Volumes (PV) into one administrative unit.

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FC: FIBRE CHANNEL

•Fibre Channel is a high-speed network technology primarily used for storage

networking.
•Despite its name, Fibre Channel signaling can run on twisted pair copper
wire in addition to fiber-optic cables.
•It has now become the standard connection type for storage area
networks
(SAN) in enterprise storage.
•Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is a transport protocol (similar to TCP used in
IP networks) that predominantly transports SCSI commands over Fiber
Channel networks.

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DAS VS NAS VS SAN
DAS NAS SAN
Storage Type Sectors Shared files Blocks
Data IDE/SCSI TCP/IP, Fiber Channel
Transmissio Ethernet
n
Access Mode Clients or Clients or Servers
servers servers
Capacity 109 109-1012 >1012
(Bytes)
Complexity Easy Moderate Difficult
Management High Moderate Low
Cost (per
GB)
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CONCLUSION

Choosing the right storage solution is not an easy task especially with such a
variety of storage technologies.
that's why, there are several key criteria to consider include:
 Capacity: the amount and type of data (file level or block level)
 Performance: I/O and throughput requirements
 Scalability: Long-term data growth
 Availability and Reliability: how mission-critical are your applications?
 Data protection: Backup and recovery requirements
 Budget concerns

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