Network attached storage is a concept in which storage is organized at file level on computer data storage attached to a computer network. NAS will provide data access to heterogeneous network clients, that means developer or a user who access data from a NAS storage is not be aware about the network client. Developer or user need to call the data, the NAS server will handle the storage clients issue(s).

The NAS unit is essentially a system with an operating system which is capable to handle NAS functionalities. The NAS can technically capable to handle all kind of computing task as it is a system, but we don’t use the system for computing instead we use it for file management in Network attached storage. The file management functions include data access, data storage etc.

The performance improvement can be done by adding RAID and clustering in NAS. My main aim is not to go in depth about network attached storage instead explain the concept of NAS and to set up a Network attached storage for my readers.

www.freenas.org is an open source Network attached storage which has a good operating system and web interface to configure the network clients.