Consolidating distributed architectures on storage networks will have two major financial and operational impacts: 1) Improved utilization of storage assets and 2) Better productivity from storage administrators. These are the two 'biggies' and everything else pales in comparison. The key to achieving these benefits is choosing the right workloads for consolidation and getting processes and procedures in order so that advanced software can be exploited.
The choice of SAN or NAS is a workload decision. SAN is better for high performance transaction-oriented work and NAS is suited for unstructured, file and certain NAS-friendly database applications. Beware of vendor hype touting metrics that compare the two environments-- they're most likely comparing apples to oranges.
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