Glossary Term

NAS

What is NAS (Network-Attached Storage)?

A file storage device that sits on your network so multiple users and systems can read and write to a shared pool of data.

Network-Attached Storage (NAS) is a storage appliance that connects to a local network and serves files to authorized users and applications. Where direct-attached storage is physically tethered to a single machine, NAS uses standard network protocols like NFS (common in Linux/Unix environments) and SMB/CIFS (common in Windows) so that many clients can reach the same files at once.

Enterprises, research labs, and government agencies use NAS to store and share unstructured data: documents, images, scientific datasets, media files, and similar content that doesn’t fit neatly into a database. Most NAS systems include multiple drives arranged for redundancy, so data stays available even when a disk fails.

NAS works well for collaborative file sharing, but managing it gets harder as the data grows. Once an organization is sitting on petabytes of files numbering in the billions, basic questions become difficult to answer: what’s stored where, who owns it, and is any of it still useful? Metadata-driven platforms like Starfish Storage help here by providing vendor-agnostic analytics, search, and automated lifecycle management across NAS environments from different vendors, all without putting extra load on the storage itself.