Skip to main content
Back to Glossary
storage

Network Attached Storage

NAS

A file-level storage system connected to a network that allows multiple clients to access shared file systems over NFS or SMB/CIFS — commonly used for shared datasets, home directories, and AI training data staging.

Unit: GB/s throughput / TB capacity

Full Definition

Network Attached Storage (NAS) provides file-level storage over standard IP networks using file sharing protocols: NFS (Network File System) for Linux/Unix clients and SMB/CIFS for Windows. Unlike SAN (block-level), NAS manages the filesystem internally and presents shared directories to clients — multiple servers can access the same files simultaneously.

NAS is used in datacentres for: shared file repositories; software build and CI/CD artifact stores; database backup targets; and AI/ML training dataset staging (where the NAS is mounted by compute nodes as a shared NFS volume). High-performance NAS appliances from NetApp (ONTAP), Dell EMC (PowerScale), and Pure Storage (FlashBlade) deliver sub-millisecond NFS latency and hundreds of GB/s of aggregate throughput.

In AI training workflows, the distinction between NAS (NFS), parallel file systems (Lustre, IBM Spectrum Scale), and object storage (S3) is significant: NFS suits moderate dataset sizes; parallel file systems suit very large training runs requiring high-bandwidth sequential reads from many GPUs; object storage suits dataset archival and data lake architectures.

Also Known As

NFS storagefile storagenetwork storage

Source Reference

SNIA Storage Networking Dictionary; NetApp ONTAP NFS Technical Report

Related Terms