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Saturday, September 04, 2010

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IT Consulting

Storage Solutions

San Francisco Bay Area Network Storage Consulting

Storage Network Solutions

With the rapid growth in the use of email, video, and archiving requirements many businesses find themselves having to manage an ever increasing amount of data. Fortunately, there are a variety of storage solutions designed to meet these needs.

DAS, NAS, and SAN?

The dreaded TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) pervade all of IT, but few places are they less understood than in the storage arena.

DAS - Directly Attached Storage is the most common type. It refers to disks physically connected to a computer. The hard disk in your PC or laptop is one example of DAS. Only the physically connected PC has direct access to the disks. DAS can also be external as with the Dell MD1000.

NAS - Network Attached Storage is a set of one or more disks connected to the network that provide File Access to the disks. Multiple computers can access the files stored on a NAS. Cisco offers a number of NAS solutions.

SAN - A Storage Area Network is a set of disks that provide Block Level storage to one or more computers.

A SAN appears just like directly connected drives to the computer, but they are in fact external to the computer and accessed over a dedicated network called a "fabric". The Dell EqualLogic PS Series and Drobo Elite are SAN products.

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The Right Storage Solution

Each of these storage types has its advantages, disadvantages, and typical application:

Type	Advantages	Disadvantages	Typical Application
DAS Directly Attached Storage	Fast disk access. Lower initial cost.	Limited expansion. Access dependent on the host computer.	Single server environments. Application server requiring high speed disk access.
NAS Network Attached Storage	Cost effective Multiple users. Easy to deploy and manage.	File access only.	Quick and cost effective way to add file storage capacity.
SAN Storage Area Network	High performance, high availability. Shared block level data transfer. Advanced storage management. Enables virtualization features.	Higher initial cost.	Shared high performance, high availability storage for multiple host Virtual Infrastructure cluster.

Why Choose Forte For Your Storage Needs?

For over 25 years, Forte has managed the storage needs for clients throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We've deployed DAS, NAS, and SAN configurations for small and medium sized companies including complex VMware clusters.

Forte is a Dell Certified Partner and VMware Enterprise Partner with engineers certified to configure and support the EqualLogic PS Series iSCSI SANs in a VMware environment.

We provide on site service throughout the Bay Area including the East Bay (Richmond, Hercules, Pinole, Benicia, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley, Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Orinda, Concord, Martinez, Dublin, Danville, San Ramon, Pleasanton, Livermore), North Bay (Marin, San Rafael, Napa, Sonoma, Petaluma), San Francisco Peninsula (San Francisco, South San Francisco, Foster City, Redwood City, San Bruno, Millbrae, Burlingame, San Mateo), South Bay (Silicon Valley, Fremont, Newark, Union City, San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale)

Forte Systems, Inc., 3260 Blume Dr., Suite 324, Richmond, CA 94806 Tel: 510-525-3000 Fax: 510-222-5901

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