Sometimes, options aren't such a great thing.

When I was a kid there was a joke about how a guy walked into a convenience store and asked for a pack of cigarettes. By the time he got through all the choices (filtered or non, menthol or non, etc) he had decided

to quit smoking out of frustration.

That's where the storage industry is today. Imagine this conversation between a CIO and a Storage

Architect:

CIO: We have a secret project going on that will need 20 terabytes of storage that is not tied to our

existing systems. What do you recommend?

SA: Do you want DAS, NAS, CAS, SAN, or iSCSI?

CIO: What's the difference?

SA: NAS is easy - throw it on the network and it appears as shares, CAS is NAS for archiving - kind of

- DAS is the simplest to configure, but it is nearly impossible to centrally manage, SAN is the easiest to

centrally manage, but is expensive like there's no tomorrow, and iSCSI is like SAN meets NAS - you can do both

with it, but unless you buy top-of-the-line there might be performance issues.

CIO: SAN. Definitely SAN.

SA: Great then, do you want FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA, or PATA drives?

CIO: HuH?

SA: FC is fastest, but the cost is higher in multiples than the others...

CIO: Never mind, we want NAS. Easy is good.

SA: Great, then do you want FC, SCSI, SAS, SATA, or PATA drives?

CIO: Sheesh. You figure it out.

SA: Okay, then do you want CIFS or NFS Support? Or both?

CIO: What's the difference?

SA: CIFS for Windows, NFS for all flavors of UNIX - Kind of.

CIO: Both.

SA: Good then, do you want it to be CAS, or straight NAS?

CIO: Forget it! Direct Attached is PERFECT!

SA: Good then, what RAID levels do we need?

CIO: What are the options?

SA: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 - which is really RAID 1+0 - RAID 50, which is...

CIO: You're fired. I need space to store data, not acronym soup. I could get this crap from a vendor.