A SAN is a network device, however, the connections act as physical storage conn ections to either the physical server

or virtual server, or workstations for tha t matter, via a network based storage protocol, not SMB. Usually this is done vi a some variation on iSCSI or Fibre Channel SCSI, sometimes NFS. A NAS is a simil ar idea, but it is most commonly used as a SMB or network share on the physical network, allowing multiple devices to access file level information, instead of carving out the storage as a block level device to a server. SAN for workstation s, or backups, is usually a bad idea. You would be more looking at a NAS soluti on, and then configuring a replication setup between NAS devices, especially for backup configurations. A SAN doesn't work well with backup and replications on backup files due to the size of changed data. NAS would cost much less and yie ld the same performance, if not better methods of network connectivity. A SAN is typically put in place for a virtualize configuration to allow multiple HOST se rvers to access a central block storage device to allow for shared access to the same physical blocks of data for moving virtual machines between hosts. Offsit e replication for SAN is also done through VPN connections, or though specialize d applications for the SAN or licensing for the SAN that provide the block level replication on the devices. SAN's do not have file level replication because t he storage controllers on the SAN are not aware of file level information, only block level data. Source: www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg245470.pdf