350-601: Implementing and Operating Cisco Data Center Core TechnologiesDemo

NAS (Network Attached Storage) provides file-level access, so its storage type is file-based data storage, in contrast to SAN's block-based storage. Clustered/scale-out NAS architectures stripe both data and metadata across multiple nodes to achieve scalability, load balancing, and fault tolerance. NAS devices connect to the network using the standard Ethernet protocol over TCP/IP, whereas SAN uses Fibre Channel or FCoE for connectivity. For serving content such as media files to network clients, NAS devices commonly implement UPnP (e.g., UPnP AV/DLNA) as a serving protocol. Block-based data storage, FCoE, and Fibre Channel protocol are all associated with SAN, not NAS, and therefore are not used.