Storage Integration

What is Storage ?

In IT, Storage normally refers to the media where important files and information are store and keep in a secure place. The list of these products are so long that it is impossible to list them all here. Hence, only those commonly found in the main stream will be introduce.

Personal Storage

Floppy Diskette is most commonly used media at any one time. There are 3 different sizes that are reasonably popular for a period of time. 8", 5¼" and 3½" inches. Their Capacities range from 180KB, 360KB 640KB, 720KB, 1200KB, 1440KBytes depending whether they are Single, Double side, Double Density or High Density.

Since the introduction of flash memory as a form of removable solid-state storage device, the fate of floppy diskette is sealed. The popularity of these flash memories is due to their feature such as

High Capacity
Noiseless
Fast Access
Small in Size
No Moving Part

Flash memory is not a new technology and as a matter of fact, it is an old technology that is made feasible and possible due to advancement of manufacturing processes. Remember your BIOSes on your PCs, these are flash memories, but are way too expensive. The new processes and mass productions greatly reduce the price of these memory modules and anyone can just pickup a piece off the shelf anywhere. Sony Memory Sticks, SD Cards, CF Cards, xD Cards are some of commonly used flash modules.

In order to push these memory modules into the PCs market, Flash Memory Drives are created. These are memory modules fixed with a USB connector for direct connection to USB ports found commonly in PCs. Users can just save and retrieve their files as if they are floppy diskettes but with higher capacities, speed and reliabilities.

Optical Storage


Optical Drive is popular due to their huge capacity and cheap media. Most commonly used are the CDRW and the DVD Writer. CDRW (Compact-Disk-Read-Write) typically have a capacity of about 700MB of data while DVD Writer have a capacity of 4700MB.

Tape Drive Storage



Till today, tape drives is the only solution in the market to backup huge amount of data. These drives have capacities from as low as Gigabytes range all the way to Terabytes range. They can be easily found in data center and network rooms in companies. It is essential for all Servers regardless of any services they are running to have a proper backup system.

Tape drives are slow in as the drives have to wind and rewind almost the entire tapes just to read a portion of information from it. Hence, it can never be a replacement for storage like harddisk for normal PCs. Moreover, these drives are relatively expensive through their usage is fully automatic.

Network Attached Storage / Storage Attached Network ( NAS / SAN )

NAS and SAN are totally different way of storage architecture through some of the devices used are similar or even the same.

The needs for increasing requirement of storage space have created these 2 new products ranges. NAS is a cheaper solution in general case. A NAS box is normally attached to network directly using the LAN ports. Configuration is done remotely and capacity of a NAS can be in Terabytes Range. In addition, these NAS disk media normally comes with RAID system for fault tolerance.

SAN, like NAS are huge storage equipments. Unlike NAS, SAN are design more for use on the server side instead of end users. Servers can make use of Diskspace in SAN setup for flexibilities and ease of maintenance. An upgrade of servers do not require massive data migration when you are using a SAN in your network setup. In addition, adding of new storage space in a SAN is much easier and do not usually require any down time.