SAN, which is short for storage area network is a network created by putting several devices together on a network with Fibre Channel. Whereas the NAS utilizes Ethernet cables to connect. Ethernet is more common than Fiber Channel and allows for TCP/IP connections.

Fiber Channel is created to handle a high demand of storage, backups and clustering. However, Fibre Channel networks are known to have many difficulties to work with. These include being very expensive to build, incompatible with other hardware and difficult to manage.

SAN is ideal for large corporations and enterprises that require more than a few terabytes of data storage as well as high performance.