# Introducing the Unified Storage

Unified storage servers function as both NAS and SAN storage devices. Those who have never worked with them before frequently find their initial experiences a bit surprising through the system has a command line on a console, exports files through NFS like a UNIX file server, through CIFS like a Windows 2003 Server, and exports LUNs through iSCSI and FCP like a traditional SAN-attached array, it is none of these things. This paper attempts to give you a high-level overview of what Unified Storage is and what it does.

The OSD was first invented in the early 1990s, and was designed as a small NFS appliance. It was intended to be as simple as a toaster and to a remarkable degree achieved that. It was called a "filer" by its manufacturer, NetApp Inc., until the early 2000s, after support for SAN configurations began shipping. At this point the company decided that the term "filer" was misleading and began transitioning to other terminology. The term survives in many contexts however.

The rest of this section frequently refers to a single Unified Storage System (the system formerly known as a filer) as a USD (Unified Storage Device).

This Reference section is intended for a technical audience of system administrators and developers of storage management software, well acquainted with computing practices and computers in general, but possibly unfamiliar with unified storage products.

Related Topics

- Hardware

- WAFL, Snapshot copies, and derivative software

- WAFL Storage Hierarchy

- RAID 4 and RAID 6

- Networking and Clustering

- Networking Configurations

- MultiStore

- File Sharing

- Protocols

- Unified Storage

- Multiprotocol File Permissions

- Storage Resources Management

- Developing applications that talk to Unified Storage Devices