Enterprise NAS gear is designed with more high-end data features to aid storage management and usually comes with at least four drive bays. Devices usually contain at least two drive bays, although single-bay systems are available for noncritical data. Others are for home offices or small businesses. Some NAS products are designed for use in large enterprises. Organizations commonly deploy a NAS environment as the foundation for a personal or private cloud. NAS connects to a wireless router, making it easy for distributed workers to access files from any desktop or mobile device with a network connection. It is useful to distributed teams that need remote access or work in different time zones. The purpose of NAS is to enable users to collaborate and share data more effectively. What is network-attached storage used for? SANs are designed primarily for block storage inside databases, also known as structured data. NAS handles unstructured data, such as audio, video, websites, text files and Microsoft Office documents. NAS and storage area networks ( SANs) are the two main types of networked storage. The devices consolidate storage in one place and support a cloud tier and tasks, such as archiving and backup. NAS stands out for its ease of access, high capacity and low cost.

Each NAS resides on the LAN as an independent network node, defined by its own unique Internet Protocol ( IP) address. NAS devices typically do not have a keyboard or display and are configured and managed with a browser-based utility. Users on a local area network ( LAN) access the shared storage via a standard Ethernet connection. Network-attached storage (NAS) is dedicated file storage that enables multiple users and heterogeneous client devices to retrieve data from centralized disk capacity.

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