Building an integrated compute and storage infrastructure with superior performance, reliability, and flexibility.
Fast, Stable and Consistent Access
Today’s IP storage applications are increasingly complex, business-critical, and high-profile. Failure is not an option. But running these bandwidth-intensive, latency sensitive applications on a shared network puts storage performance and availability at risk. The best-practice solution for storage networking within and between data centers is (and always has been) a dedicated, fabric-based network. We know, because we cut our industry teeth pioneering innovative storage network fabrics, and we’ve been the undisputed technology leader for many years. |
Choose the Right System is Vitally Important.
Block storage, file storage, and object storage each excel in different areas. Understanding the storage landscape and the advantages and costs of each type of storage allows savvy users to choose the right system for their use case. In BluewaveNT, we will advice and design the best storage system that suite your business needs for upcoming years to scale. With strong Storage System Knowledge and enthusiasm, we have been successfully deploy storage system that keeping business running 24x7 without any storage hiccups for our customers. |
Don’t let your storage infrastructure hold your business back
Uptime is a mandate, not a convenience. Bluewave Network can help you transform your data center into a flexible, responsive business driver that is secure and stable enough to accommodate a distributed workforce running the most demanding applications.
- Align your IT with your business goals. BluewaveNT strategy services provide a strategic plan based on targeted assessments.
- Architect the optimal storage environment. BluewaveNT design services deliver detailed design and implementation plans.
- Increase IT efficiency and reduce costs. BluewaveNT deploy and transition services use proven methods and architectures.
- Keep your IT environment running at peak performance. BluewaveNT Services drive operational excellence and cost efficiency.
Type Of Storage System (Storage Systems Overview):
There are only three types of storage: block, file, and object. Each type offers their own advantages and has their own use cases.
Block Storage gives you access to the “bare metal”. There is no concept of “files” at this level. There are just evenly sized blocks of data. Generally, using block storage offers the best performance, but it is quite low-level. Database servers often times can take advantage of block storage systems. An example of a common block storage system is a SAN.
File storage provides access to a file system. This is the most familiar kind of storage–it’s what we interact with most on a daily basis. Users of file storage have access to files and can read and write to either the whole file or a part of it. File systems are what operating systems provide on all of our personal computers. In a shared environment, file storage is often seen as a network drive.
Object Storage is probably the least familiar type of storage to most people. Object storage doesn’t provide access to raw blocks of data. It doesn’t offer file-based access. Object storage provides access to whole objects, or blobs of data and generally does so with an API specific to that system. Unlike file storage, object storage generally does not allow the ability to write to one part of a file. Objects must be updated as a whole unit.
Different in between Storage System of Direct Attached, Storage Area Networks, and Network Attached Storage
There are only three types of storage: block, file, and object. Each type offers their own advantages and has their own use cases.
Block Storage gives you access to the “bare metal”. There is no concept of “files” at this level. There are just evenly sized blocks of data. Generally, using block storage offers the best performance, but it is quite low-level. Database servers often times can take advantage of block storage systems. An example of a common block storage system is a SAN.
File storage provides access to a file system. This is the most familiar kind of storage–it’s what we interact with most on a daily basis. Users of file storage have access to files and can read and write to either the whole file or a part of it. File systems are what operating systems provide on all of our personal computers. In a shared environment, file storage is often seen as a network drive.
Object Storage is probably the least familiar type of storage to most people. Object storage doesn’t provide access to raw blocks of data. It doesn’t offer file-based access. Object storage provides access to whole objects, or blobs of data and generally does so with an API specific to that system. Unlike file storage, object storage generally does not allow the ability to write to one part of a file. Objects must be updated as a whole unit.
Different in between Storage System of Direct Attached, Storage Area Networks, and Network Attached Storage
- Direct Attached Storage (DAS): This is the most common storage type. As the name implies, the block device is directly attached to the system bus of the host system. Any hard drive or collection of drives on a system can be a DAS. DAS also extends itself to JBODs (Just a Bunch of Disks) in a separate enclosure directly attached to the host system. By being directly attached it is fast and simple to configure. The major drawback of most DAS systems is their inflexibility; DAS systems are normally a fixed size and growing them is difficult. Also, the nature of their file systems usually mean they are tied to the host system and concurrent access it not possible from another system.
- Storage Area Network (SAN): A SAN takes the block devices away from the host and normally aggregates them in disk arrays that are attached using a specialized storage network. Fibre-Channel is typically the interconnect used to create the network, but recently iSCSI, which implements the SCSI protocol over IP, has gained popularity with the advent of 10 Gigabit networks. The primary benefit of SANs are the performance characteristics of a storage optimized network and the ability to grow as requirements expand. On the flip-side, SANs are historically expensive and require specialized administrators to manage the Fibre-Channel infrastructure. SANs also are local networks because the signaling technologies are intolerant of latency and loss.
- Network Attached Storage (NAS): Whereas DAS and SAN are block storage systems, NAS presents a filesystem over the network as a protocol. Modern NAS is purely IP based and the NAS protocols typically found in the enterprise are NFS, and CIFS/SMB. Some NAS systems also implement FTP as an access protocol, but FTP was not originally designed to support file access in the same way a file system is designed to. NAS systems provide the benefits of SAN over commodity IP networks without the administrative overhead and cost. The drawback of NAS is that they are not normally designed for high performance applications. As networking technology advances provide faster bandwidth interconnects, NAS has grown more viable for for higher performance storage applications. NAS perform best in a LAN for many of the reasons Wide Area SAN is not realistic.