by George Crump
Ask, “what’s the best way to connect to my storage”? and you’re sure to get a wide variety of answers. A few years ago, the answer you’d get would be largely dependent on the type of vendor that you were working with, since most only supported one method each. Now though most vendors support at least two and a few support just about all storage connectivity options. They will now often answer “Whatever one you want,” which doesn’t solve your problem.

The selection process has been made even more complex by increasing options. The number of connectivity options to storage has continued to increase over recent years. In addition to the old standbys of network attached storage (NAS), fibre channel (FC), and iSCSI, we have added fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and ATA over Ethernet (AoE). In fact, as we describe in our “SAS Primer White Paper,” even serial attached SCSI (SAS) can be shared to a degree. Finally there is the resurgence of direct attached storage (DAS), thanks to smarter applications like Exchange 2010.

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