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The other alternative is a Storage Area Network or SAN, which is what we are using at Drew. A SAN is a large, high-performance central storage system. Instead of presenting file systems to servers using high-level protocols such as CIFS or NFS, a SAN presents a *block-level* or physical device to the server. It looks like a locally attached disk to the server, even though it could be feet, yards, or miles away. And it may not even be a single disk or disk array.
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