Rafe September 06, 2013 9:16 am

Eli,Thanks for your question! Here's the (relatively) short aeswnr - some SANs can function as both. One example that we've had a lot of experience with is the NetApp FAS series. While using the appliance as both SAN & NAS can be done, in most cases a NAS is used for low-performance data storage. A better use for a SAN is when either storage virtualization or virtualization platforms need to be run. I hope that helps clarify for you!