Webopedia Terms of the Day: Storage Networking Versus Storage Management

“Storage
management: The phrase storage management is a general storage
industry term used to describe the tools, processes, and policies
used to manage storage networks and storage services such as
virtualization, replication, mirroring, security, compression,
traffic analysis, and other services. The phrase also encompasses
other storage technologies, such as process automation, storage
management and real-time infrastructure products, and storage
provisioning.

Storage
networking: The phrase storage networking, or storage network,
is used to describe a high-speed network of shared storage devices.
The storage network is used by IT departments to connect different
types of storage devices with data servers for a larger network of
users. As more storage devices are added to the storage network,
they too will be accessible from any server in the larger network.
Storage networking is a phrase most commonly associated with
enterprises and data centers.

“Network storage is not all that much different from networked
systems — it provides storage services over a network. Just
as you can have as few as two machines hooked together in a
networked system, you can have a server and storage connected
together in a storage network. Or, you can have hundreds or
thousands of machines connected to hundreds or even thousands of
storage systems, both locally or over wide area networks
(WANs).

“Common storage networking systems include the following:
Network Attached Storage (NAS), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE),
Storage Area Network (SAN), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI),
Serial Advanced, Technology Attachment (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI
(SAS), Fibre Channel, Internet SCSI (iSCSI ), Redundant Array of
Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks (RAID).”

Complete
Story