Introduction of Network Storage.

Before directly navigating towards knowing What is Network Storage, let’s see how network storage is invented. As you know we were lucky enough to witness the rise of technology. Multimedia technology is one of them which enjoyed unimaginable rise. We have seen tremendous change in multimedia technology, let us consider an example of mobile multimedia technology that requires a sort of local storage device, in the form of a memory card to store multimedia files.

Storage devices are requiring to store objects such as text, image, video, audio, etc. Traditional storage devices include pen drives, hard drives, SSD any many more. They are heavily used in today’s Personal computers, Laptops, Mobiles phones but they are having two most important problems associated with them, these are

1. Sharing is not possible
2. Cannot Scalable

We have used a Nokia3310 up to today’s latest android and iPhone mobile handsets. If we compare the image size of the Nokia 6600 and the latest mobile phones then we observe that image size increases about 5 times as the camera megapixel increases. The same case happens in the term of size of the video. Latest video technologies include 4K resolution, increased frame rate, 3D/5D/7D immersion and thus it requires tremendous local storage memory of about several hundred MB for about 1 min of video. Overall the memory requirement of individual users increases at ultra-high speed and to cope up with this speed one requires a very huge amount of external storage.

New solutions such as external drives were very famous among users which overcome the problem but this strategy again began to inefficient as user method began to change. Nowadays user is multi-device and globally roaming thus external storage method strategy will not be enough and useful. Also, this is a very costly solution and not feasible too.

To tackle this problem researchers and engineers have coined the new term that is network storage technology. It’s a type of virtual memory and can be accessed through an internet connection irrespective of device, irrespective of location.

What is Network Storage? (Technically Concept)

Network storage is simply virtual storage but seems like physical storage that we are going to use. The storage devices are remotely placed and can be accessed with the help of internet thus network connectivity is most important here while considering this type of storages. It removes storage limitation and availability problems which are worth of concern in terms of physical storage devices

Network storage is a very important aspect while considering the individual or business sector. Due to proper storage management techniques, the small-scale industries can concentrate on their improvement of server performance & availability of their web applications. Today we are having multiple flavors of network storage technologies, some of which are Cloud, NAS, and SAN, etc. We will see each of these in brief and will head towards block storage.

Types of Network Storage

1. Cloud Storage

Cloud storages are very popular nowadays. Here the user data is transmitted and stored at remote storage devices which may be in the form of multiple servers and multiple locations too with the help of the internet. This data is in the form of a logical pool called “the cloud” which is further managed for maintenance and backups. It is made available to end-user as per their requirement. Some cloud services are paid while some services are free to the user. The best example of cloud service is Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, Microsoft One Drive and other dozens of cloud storage providers.

There are a lot of benefits we can enjoy while using cloud storage but there are also some areas that require our attention. While enjoying several benefits such as Usability and accessibility, Cost-efficiency, Synchronization, Scalability, Disaster recovery etc. we shouldn’t neglect the most critical issues such as Internet dependency, Data security, and privacy, the Expensive cloud storages.

Thus, it’s your decision whether to go to the cloud or not??

2. NAS (Network Attached Storage)

If you are not happy with the risk of security which is the most critical parameter in cloud storage, then you can have NAS which gives a little confidence regarding your security-related doubts.

Technically speaking NAS is a type of external drive but which is mounted itself on a local area network such as Ethernet or Wi-Fi. What is the most important thing is that the NAS should be always connected to the internet. Once it active on the network anyone can access it like a local hard drive. The data on NAS can be accessed as “files”

You can access NAS remotely by proper configuring your local area network, without any risk of security but again it has a limitation of maximum capacity. We can have one option to solve this problem that is we have to create a series of NAS to increase the capacity but again this is not a feasible solution because each NAS must be controlled separately and it’s a bit complex and difficult.

3. SAN (Storage Area Network)

As discussed earlier problems related to NAS can be tackled with SAN. SAN is a network of interconnected storage devices that can be accessed with the help of internet connectivity. We can compare SAN with disk server. SAN is preferred mostly by Developers, Data centers, Businesses, large establishments, etc. In SAN the data is accessed in the form of “blocks” therefore sometimes referred to as block-level storage. Nowadays NAS is synonymously called block storage. They require different protocols instead of TCP/IP such as Fiber Channel and iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface

Benefits of SAN:

1. As it is a group of storage devices thus there is not any limitation on capacity. We can add multiple storage devices as per our requirement. A storage pool can provide limitless access to the resources being used.
2. The most important benefits of SAN are Data backups this is very useful in disaster recovery.
3. Synchronization is also one of the great benefits SAN gives. We can have the facility to automate the synchronization as per our required time frame. It takes care that no single piece of data remains unhandled

Block Storage Server (SAN)

We can use the block storage method as an alternative to the file storage method block storage method is also known as block-level storage, is a fixed-sized, row storage method that is reliable, fast, efficient, and redundant. Here the data is being chopped into smaller pieces called “blocks”, which are then assigned a unique number for proper identification required for retrieving data. All the blocks are of the same size and each one is having a unique identifier. As the files are braked into different pieces they lost their original meaning and therefore cannot be readable or able to execute.

Here in block storage data is considered as the raw piece and each piece is considered as a separate individual hard drive thus we can use it for any purpose such as database, virtual machine file storage.

Block storages mostly suitable for container technologies. File system storage operates data into files and folders but here chunk of data is stored in the form blocks. They are generally used to take snapshots which is backup taken at different specific point in time.

Introduction to VCCL Block Storage:

We at VCCL Cloud provide you with multiple block storage packages. You can use these packages as per your choice and requirement. We are having Block Storage I, II, III and IV each with different storage and snapshot capacities, some of the best features are Unlimited Disk Space

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

Unmetered Bandwidth

One-Click Installs Scripts

Free Premium DNS

The VCCL Block Storage service allows you to store your valuable data like video, images, emails, backup files, observation streams, genomics, and the sky is the limit from there. Programmers can use VCCL Block Storage service for computing solutions to their fast and efficient projects. To check all configuration kindly visit our plan page — Block Storage Server