Just saw this on AJB (Amercia's JobBank)

[deadpoint]

san is more of a 'sea of LUN's or disks' then a 'sea of directories'. in 
  fact the disk is presented to the server as if it where a single disk 
drive. you then make a filesystem (or multiple) on that 'disk' as you 
would an IDE drive in your home computer. SAN is hardware RAID on roids.

as dennis said the big difference between NAS and SAN is presentation of 
the storage to the hosts. NAS presents as filesystem, i.e NFS and PC 
Shares, where SAN persents only as disk. but if you attach SAN storage 
to a linux server and export/share filesystems with samba and nfs you 
have s NAS.

darin

Dennis Ruzeski wrote:

> SAN = Storage Area Network-
> It's a pool of disks usually shared amongst a number of hosts. 
> 
> The difference between a NAS (Network Attatch Storage) and a SAN is in the presentation. A NAS is usually just a regular mount (via NFS). A SAN appears to the system as a 'sea of directories'.. The idea is simple, but I'm not explaining it well-- Can anybody else out there come up with a better analogy or method of explaining this?
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe [mailto:josephj at main.nc.us]
> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 7:29 PM
> To: nflug at nflug.org
> Subject: Re: Just saw this on AJB (Amercia's JobBank)
> 
> 
> Can someone enlighten me as to what SAN is?
> 
> Joe
> 
> frank at mogosystems.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>Essential Accountabilities: Ensure availability of Unix Servers and SAN attached
>> 
>>