Enterprise Storage (SAN/NAS/S3)

There are several storage options available to faculty and staff. All options provide high availability and are scalable but the features of each vary along with how they are billed. See the Comparison Table below to select the option that best fits your needs.

Types of Storage Access

Storage Area Network (SAN) - Access by block-level devices via fiber channel infrastructure or iSCSI. The SAN is a network that provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to enhance storage devices, such as disk arrays, and tape libraries accessible to servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as locally attached devices.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) - File-Level Access via NFS and CIFS. The NAS is a file-level (POSIX file system) connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients as a mountable network file share.
S3 Object Storage (On-prem and Wasabi Cloud) - Object storage is a technology that manages data as objects. All data is stored in one large repository which may be distributed across multiple physical storage devices, instead of being divided into files or folders.

graphic comparing storage options, all content is provided in comparison table

Comparison of Features

	Performance	Utility	Active Archive Object Storage	Wasabi Cloud Storage
Best Use	Best for high I/O enterprise systems, such as large database servers and VM clusters. Enterprise applications, Relational databases, NoSQL databases, Big data analytics engines	Ideal for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads with large datasets and large I/O sizes. Department and user shares as an example	Scale-out S3 compatible onsite object storage system designed to manage massive amounts of unstructured data and is suited for large sequential workloads Store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics.	Wasabi is a popular cloud object storage service. It's value-oriented, high-performance, low-latency, and highly-available cloud object storage offering. It’s designed to be 100% compatible and interoperable with the Simple Storage Service (S3) available from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Delivering web application assets and content Target for backup software Hold data for analysis Integration with service pipelines
Vendor Type	Pure/NetApp	Hitachi/NetApp	Cloudian	Public Cloud Wasabi
Monthly Rate & Billing Model	$0.11/GB/Month No Egress or API feeBilled as recharge	$0.04/GB/MonthBilled as recharge	5 year (Hardware/software support purchase model) Not a recharge service, cost recovery.	$.0059 per GB/month ($5.99 per TB/month), pay for amount used (cost pass-through)
Access Fees	No Egress or API fee	No Egress or API fee	No Egress or API fee	No Egress or API fee
Minimum Purchase	100 GB	1 TB	112 TB	1 TB Start out size
Purchase Commitment	None	None	5 year (Hardware/software support purchase model) - not a recharge service	None
Data Copies included	1 copy of data	1 copy of data	1 copy of data (versioning can be implemented)	1 copy of data (versioning can be implemented)
Data Durability	99.9999% for both Block and NAS Storage (NAS storage include snapshots for quick data recovery at no charge)	99.9999% for both Block and NAS Storage (NAS storage includes snapshots for quick data recovery at no charge)	99.999999%	Eleven 9's durability
Onsite Vendor Support	Included (24x7)	Included (24x7)	Included (24x7)	N/A
Onsite SBG Support	Included (24x7)	Included (24x7)	Included (24x7)	N/A
Flexible Storage Capacity	100GB buy-in with flexible growth/reduction moving forward in increments as small as 1GB	1 TB buy-in with flexible growth/reduction moving forward in increments as small as 1GB	112 TB increments	1 TB buy-in with flexible growth/reduction moving forward in increments as small as 1GB
Performance Array Monitoring	Included	Included	Included	N/A
Connection Methods	Attached Block Storage, Mountable POSIX File-based storage, NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Object Storage	Attached Block Storage, Mountable POSIX File-based storage, NFS, SMB, iSCSI, and Object Storage	Any application that speaks S3. API, Syncing App, Web Browser, POSIX File-based storage (NFS and CIFS), rclone, Globus, Cyberduck, Filezilla, WinSCP, s3 browser, etc...	Any application that speaks S3. Wasabi Explorer for Windows and MAC (free app), Cloudberry, Cyberduck, rclone, Globus, etc...
Ability to Scale to Public Cloud	Yes	Yes	Yes	Public Cloud
Backups	Local snapshots and replication to private/public cloud	Local snapshots and disaster recovery and backup options to SDSC in place and available for public cloud	Replication to secondary data center available and option to tier into public cloud	Can replicate to another availability zone
Request Service	For all storage options you can request service by sending a message to: storage-ticket@berkeley.edu
Ask Questions/ Get Help	Send general questions or get help: storageteam@lists.berkeley.edu.