Storage Terminologies Simplified

Before this month whenever i listen this word “Storage” ,i only think about HDD, memory cards and all others medium of storage. My thought was very limited to these and then i get into the open source project OpenEBS which is going to deliver the containerized storage for containers. I still don't know much about the Storage but i discovered some of the terminologies related to storage, about which i’m going to write about.

Basically Storage are of two types:
1. File level Storage (NAS)
2. Block level Storage (SAN)

File level Storage : These are also known as NAS (Network Attached Storage). In the FLS the storage devices handles the files, folders and sub-folders onto that device. They might have permissions like read and write, some of the devices also come with user access controls and authentications or having the high level of security. FLS are used for very general purpose and are known for easy implementation and maintainance. FLS uses file level protocols such as SMB/CIFS, NFS.

Block level Storage : These are known as SAN (Storage Area Network). In this type of storage each blocks are controlled by the separate hard drive and managed by the server based OS. BLL are used in the Databases and VMs etc. Data transport in BLL are very reliable and efficient, it also supports any type of file system. BLL are very flexible and due to its flexibility it is used in the Big organisations. They may have master/slave configurations, also known as Controller and Replica configurations.It uses the iSCSI or fibre channel protocol.

Some Terminologies

iSCSI and Fibre Channel : iSCSI is the protocol that discovers storage as local disk, basically Ethernet is used for data transfer while optical fibre cables are used in the Fibre channel. FC delivers high speed data transfer.

S3 : It is the web service interface used to store or retrieve any amount of data at anytime from anywhere on the web.

Data Deduplication : Removing the redundancy or removing the several instances of the same data occur at the source or target level is known as data deduplication. Hashing algorithms are used for data deduplication.

Snapshots : To avoid the situations like data corruption, data loss, back up copy is created, this is known as snapshots at particular point in time.

Hot Data & Cold Data: Data which is used very frequently is known as hot data and the data which is used rarely is known as Cold Data.

~ उत्कर्ष_उवाच