Tech Outlook: Storage.

(From Network Computing Asian Edition)

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The death of DAS. Storing for the future.

The death of DAS

The way most enterprises employ storage technology?with disk drives directly attached to servers?is rapidly going out-of-date, especially in today?s networked organisations, where storage and data management are more important than ever before.

New storage networking technologies are bringing storage into the modern networked era. These developments will make it easier for companies that have multiple databases?for sales, manufacturing, support, and customer service, for example?to cross-reference these disparate sources and build a more complete view of their organisations, making their operations and employees more productive. Likewise, central access simplifies maintenance, which helps keep costs in check and simplifies managing growth as well.

One storage networking arrangement is called network-attached storage (NAS). In simplest terms, storage devices in a NAS setup have network addresses instead of physical connections to servers, so network devices can access the networks directly without going through a particular server machine.