What You Need to Know about Storage Servers
A storage server is not your regular server. Configured and designed for a specific purpose, it can either come with a great deal of storage space or maybe very little storage space. The typical server is usually configured to perform multiple functions, and operates as a file, print, application database, Web, or miscellaneous server. It must have fast chips, more RAM, and plenty of internal disk space to handle anything that the end users may decide on. While the conventional server is configured to perform multiple functions, the storage server is a great way of sharing common information among a group of users. As the information is centralized, it is the storage server that offers the backup support. With the help of a centralized server, the expense of retrieving or maintaining data becomes much simpler.
Storage servers usually come with a host of specialized services that includes storage management software, extra hardware for higher resilience, a range of RAID configurations and extra network connections to enable more users to be desktops to be connected to it. Although storage servers are normally individual units, they are sometimes built into A4U rackmount. Alternatively, they can consist of two boxes — a storage unit and a server that is located close by. A regular server has to be generic as it doesn’t know what kind of load demands it will have. A storage server like a NAS box is a contained appliance that does file serving really well.
Being pre-configured, they are easy to implement in most network environments. They typically include one or two Gigabit Ethernet connections and a wizard-driven GUI interface. Like there can be confusion between ordinary and storage servers, there can also be confusion between storage servers and disk arrays. While a storage server can have as many as 24 disks, disk arrays, however, can have hundreds of disks. The server can manage several tiers of storage. It can even arrange the reproduction of data from one tier to another. Simply put, a storage server serves the storage, while the disk array is the storage.
Service providers in storage server solutions can deliver high reliability and performance. The technologies used in these solutions helps in configuring the software and OS to deploy at optimal layers. For a competitive price, there are several OEM manufacturers offer storage server facilities and provider users with complete personalization, quick turnaround time and unparallel reliability. With careful comparisons, you can choose a good storage server.