A systems administrator is designing a storage solution for a new virtualization cluster that will host several high-transaction databases. The primary requirements are for the virtual machines to have dedicated, low-latency, block-level storage access over a high-speed, dedicated network. The solution must support a high number of I/O operations per second (IOPS). Which of the following solutions should the administrator implement?
The correct answer is a Storage Area Network (SAN). A SAN is a dedicated, high-speed network that provides block-level access to consolidated storage. This architecture makes storage appear as a local disk to the servers, which is ideal for performance-sensitive, transactional workloads like databases and virtualization that require low latency and high IOPS.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is incorrect because it operates at the file level (using protocols like NFS or SMB/CIFS), which introduces more overhead and latency compared to block-level access, making it less suitable for high-performance database applications.
Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) is incorrect because it connects storage directly to a single server and is not a networked solution that can be shared across a cluster of virtualization hosts.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) is a technology used to combine multiple physical disks into a single logical unit for data redundancy and performance. While a SAN will almost certainly use a RAID configuration for its underlying disks, RAID itself is not the networking solution that provides shared block-level access to the servers.