Classifications of Switch:
Manageability:
The feature of a switch that enables you to configure or modify a configuration either through a web GUI or CLI.
Power Injection:
The capability of a switch that facilitates powering a device (such as an IP phone, IP Surveillance Camera, or Wireless Access Point) over the same cable as the data traffic.
Operation Layers:
Based on the OSI model Architecture, switches are mailnly of 2 types depending on the layer at which it operates.
Network switch speeds:
This value shows the maximum packet rate the switch can support on all ports at all supported speeds.
Stack-ability:
Ability to internet connect/stack multiple switches to act as a single switch and perform configuration, management, and troubleshooting instead of performing on each switch individually. It provides a way to simplify management and increase the availability of the network.
Further reading:
https://www.ieee.li/pdf/viewgraphs/introduction_to_poe_802.3af_802.3at.pdf
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The key difference here is, a NAS is connected to a client as a file server. The data on a NAS is managed by the NAS itself and thus presented as “files,”. But a SAN provides Block-level access to the clients, where the storage is presented to a client as a disk, visible in disk and volume management utilities. The client connects to the SAN as virtual local storage which can be formatted with a file system and mounted. The data on a SAN is managed by the client itself and not by the SAN Storage. SANs mostly use other network protocols like Fibre Channel and iSCSI instead of TCP/IP in NAS.
A SAN storage is designed specifically to handle structured workloads such as databases. Storage area networks are frequently deployed in support of business-critical, performance-sensitive applications such as Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL Server databases, Large virtualization deployments using VMware, KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V, Large virtual desktop infrastructures (VDIs), SAP, or other large ERP or CRM environments, etc.
]]>A NAS storage can be configured with a variety of protocols such as Network File System (NFS) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) to access and store data. This makes a NAS device a versatile cross-platform solution that you can use with Windows PCs, Mac computers, Linux, or mobile devices.
]]>Here I would like to discuss 2 storage types which make most of our daily use cases whether in our business or home.
Both these solutions provide storage facilities over the LAN, but they have got significant differences. We will discuss that in more detail.
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