File Storage

File Storage is the storage of data in a hierarchical structure of folders and files. This form of storage corresponds to the familiar way of working with file systems and network drives and is therefore particularly intuitive for many users.

File storage is usually provided via NAS systems (network attached storage) with the protocols SMB (Windows environments) and NFS (Linux/Unix). Typical fields of application are shared documents, home directories, team repositories, content repositories and classic business applications. Its strengths are ease of use, established permission structures and high everyday acceptance; for extreme scaling requirements or cloud-native workloads, however, object or block storage is often the better choice.

Because file shares frequently contain business-critical and sensitive content, file storage is not just about storage space, but about collaboration, permissions and protection of the data – and thus a fixed component of Data Management in practically every IT landscape.