I want to talk a bit about the "Why" of SAN and NAS. If you've been in this industry awhile you probably know that SANs were really the only thing that worked in this market, but now everyone is all aboard the NAS train.
We're not going to talk about the technical differences between SAN and NAS, you can learn that here. Instead we are strictly going to focus on why this shift happened.
So between 2011 to 2017 we saw our whole industry shift over to NAS.
The one main reason for this switch is individual workstation performance. The back end performance of these systems has always been pretty similar. But back when all this shared storage for video teams was getting started, SANs were the only topology that could actually get you the performance you need on a workstation.
Fast forward a bit and ProRes comes out, codecs get really good, suddenly compression is pretty awesome and your performance requirements become less because of that (at least on a network level). Ethernet also went from 1G to 10G and starts becoming reasonably available and then suddenly the benefits of NAS start to shine.
If you want to dive deeper into why video editors shifted from SAN to NAS, check out this video below.