Using Sans and NAS: Help for Storage Administrators

I found this book to be very helpful in sorting out the differences between the two technologies that have started to blur in many ways. I read this book from cover to cover and the layout was great. The book starts with a good overview of the past technologies that most IT people know and then begins to compair them to NAS and SAN and shows how those old technologies are evolving to fit into the new design. As someone who has not had exposure to Fiber Channel hands on the book did a great job of explaining the technology and what part it plays. It gives a real nuts and bolts explination of the peices and what they all do. The book then goes into describing SAN. It gives some typical uses along with the advantages and even the disavantages of SAN. In the next chapter it describes one of the major advantages to SAN in terms of Backup and Recovery. It doesn't go into detail and tell you what the commands are to do these things but more what you need to get the job done and what role each part plays. The next three chapters are on NAS. The first one gives an overview of NAS and goes into uses along with the advantages and disadvantages of it. The second chapter gives information on how to manage NAS and is a bit too specific but does give a good foundation for the things that you need to look for to get the most out of NAS. The thirst chapter is on Backup and Recovery in a NAS environment. It gives a good overview of the technologies that exist but again gets into a little too much detail and is hung up on specific technologies. Overall I would suggest this book to any IT people who have a solid background in server and network technology but are looking for what storage solutions exist and how they can be leveraged.

This book is really good at bringing together a lot of different details together having it make sense. It has been a couple of years since I worked on SANs and reading this book really refreshed the concepts for me. W. Curtis Preston's writing style is very easy to follow as he usually adds in insightful side items to break up the book a bit. I was expecting a very well written book as I also read his backup & recovery book which I really enjoyed too. I reccomend this book to anyone who is starting to investigate san or nas solutions or wants to get a good solid starting point with those technologies.

I found this to be an excellent introductory book on SAN and NAS. The book is divided equally between the two technologies. I certainly recommend it for any one who wants to get into network storage technology.

If you are looking for a very concise examination of SAN and NAS technologies, this is the right book. While it is a fraction of the size of some other books on the topic, it is a to-the-point treatment of the major architectural components of each.There is a lot of foundation info that is somewhat assumed and reviewed briefly, but the killer chapters are on backup and restore methodologies around these technologies.This is not a disk array or fibre-channel switch product guide nor does it explain every last detail of SCSI commands. But if the need is to understand these technologies and their place in your infrastructure, this is a good work.Well worth the purchase price.