I always thought SAN was essentially cloud storage in that you have an external pool of storage servers connected to your LAN.
By my understanding, the limitation is that traditionally, servers from different vendors in a SAN required their own specific storage because of different environments (Windows vs. Linux for example)
Does cloud storage specifically refer to being able to virtualize the servers such that it is vendor-agnostic?
In: Technology
Storage Area Networks are still devices you own at the device level, but you get to interact it with it over network protocols. So…access to the SAN can be integrated into local network topologies sometimes more cheapy, and expanding capacity can be easier as well. But, you still buy hardware, your total available disk space is the sum of your drives and so on. Cloud storage in the truest sense is either entirely or hybrid where you don’t own any hardware, it’s not located on your local network, and you probably don’t even know anything about the underlying hardware being used. In cloud storage you buy space, in SAN storage you buy devices.
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