Due to cost and implementation time pressures, a security architect has allowed a NAS to be used instead of a SAN for a non-critical, low volume database. Which of the following would make a NAS…

Question

Options

• AFile level transfer of data
• BZoning and LUN security
• CBlock level transfer of data
• DMultipath
• EBroadcast storms
• FFile level encryption
• GLatency

• A
  62% (18)
• B
  10% (3)
• C
  21% (6)
• D
  3% (1)
• F
  3% (1)

Explanation

NAS (Network-Attached Storage) operates at the file level over standard Ethernet, while SAN (Storage Area Network) operates at the block level over a dedicated storage fabric. Three reasons NAS fails for this use case: (A) File-level transfer - databases require block-level I/O for efficient read/write operations; file-level access adds overhead and reduces performance. (E) Broadcast storms - NAS shares a standard Ethernet network, which is susceptible to broadcast storms that degrade or completely disrupt availability. (G) Latency - NAS incurs significantly higher latency due to file system overhead and shared network contention, making it unsuitable for high-volume transactional databases. Options B (Zoning/LUN security) and D (Multipath) are SAN advantages that NAS lacks but are not direct failure modes. Option C (block-level) is a SAN feature, not a NAS drawback. Option F (file-level encryption) is available on NAS and is not a disqualifying factor.

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