When designing a new private cloud platform, a cloud engineer wants to make sure the new hypervisor can be configured as fast as possible by cloning the OS from the other hypervisor. The engineer does

CAS (Content Addressable Storage) is designed for immutable object storage retrieved by content hash, such as archiving; it is not suitable for block-level OS booting or real-time hypervisor workloads.

NAS provides file-level access over NFS or SMB, which can host VM data files but does not natively present the raw block devices needed for diskless boot from a cloned OS image.

DAS (Direct Attached Storage) is physically connected to a single host; it cannot be shared across hypervisors for cloning and directly contradicts the requirement to avoid local drives.

A Storage Area Network presents block-level storage volumes directly to hosts over a high-speed fabric such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI, allowing hypervisors to boot from a centrally stored OS image. This makes it straightforward to clone a hypervisor OS by copying or snapshotting the boot LUN, and it eliminates the need for local drives entirely because all storage resides on the SAN array.