| Technology | Pros | Cons |
| DAS | •Suited for extremely small or legacy hardware and operations | •Inefficient provisioning |
| ·Storage capabilities usually embedded into server technology, requiring no installation | ·Adding storage means adding servers | |
| | ·Require downtime to add capacity | |
| | ·Can't share storage resources | |
| NAS | •Easy to install and manage | •Performance, not as good as SAN |
| ·Less complex than SAN technology | ·As NAS filer capacity fills up, it becomes a bottleneck and single point of failure | |
| ·Allows you to share files and capacity throughout multiple operating systems and file systems | ·No database support, just file transfers | |
| ·Allows you to purchase storage separate from other computing resources | | |
| SAN | •Best performance (2 Gbps with 4 Gbps coming soon) | •Expensive purchase price |
| ·High scalability | ·Requires additional skills to install and manage | |
| ·Pool shared storage resources | ·Interconnects limited to 10 km | |
| ·Ability to add additional capacity at will | ·Interoperability issues between vendors |