What is network-attached storage used for?

The purpose of network-attached storage is to enable users to collaborate and share data more effectively. It is useful to distributed teams that need remote access or work in different time zones. NAS connects to a wireless router, making it easy for distributed workers to access files from any desktop or mobile device with a network connection. Organizations commonly deploy a NAS environment as a storage filer or the foundation for a personal or private cloud.

Some NAS products are designed for use in large enterprises QNAP QTS/QuTS etc. Others are for home offices or small businesses. Devices usually contain at least two drive bays, although single-bay systems are available for noncritical data. Enterprise NAS gear is designed with more high-end data features to aid storage management and usually comes with at least four drive bays.

NAS use cases and examples

The type of HDD selected for a NAS device will depend on the applications to be used. Sharing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Word documents with co-workers is a routine task, as is performing periodic data backup. Conversely, using NAS to handle large volumes of streaming media files requires larger capacity disks, more memory and more powerful network processing.

At home, people use a NAS system to store and serve multimedia files and to automate backups. Home users rely on network-attached storage to do the following:

manage smart TV storage;

manage security systems and security updates;

manage consumer-based IoT components;

create a media streaming service;

manage torrent files;

host a personal cloud server; and

create, test and develop a personal website.

In the enterprise, NAS is used in the following ways:

as a backup target, using a NAS array, for archiving and disaster recovery;

for testing and developing web-based and server-side web applications;

for hosting messaging applications;

for hosting server-based, open source applications, such as customer relationship management, human resource management and enterprise resource planning applications; and

for serving email, multimedia files, databases and print jobs.

Take this example of how enterprises use the technology: When a company imports many images every day, it cannot stream this data to the cloud because of latency. Instead, it uses an enterprise-class NAS to store the images and cloud caching to maintain connections to the images stored on premises.

Higher-end NAS products have enough disks to support redundant arrays of independent disks, or RAID, which is a storage configuration that turns multiple hard disks into one logical unit to boost performance, high availability and redundancy.