A host bus adapter (HBA) is a hardware device, such as a circuit board or

integrated circuit adapter, that provides I/O processing and physical

connectivity between a host system, such as a server, and a storage device.
The HBA transmits data between the host device and the storage system in a
SAN and relieves the host microprocessor of the tasks of storing data and
retrieving data. The result? Improved server performance.

A Fibre Channel (FC) adapter is ahardware component that provides

connectivity from a server to a storage area network (SAN).

An FC adapter, which uses the Peripheral Component Interconnect

(PCI) slots on the server, can have one, two or four ports. The number of
adapters used in an implementation depends on the use case -- for
example, storage features such as redundancy or the need for a
fasterconnection might require additional ports. Most adapters are backward-
compatible with previous generation connection speeds.

A LUN is a Logical Unit Number. It can be used to refer to an entire physical

disk, or a subset of a larger physical disk or disk volume. The physical disk or
disk volume could be an entire single disk drive, a partition (subset) of a single
disk drive, or disk volume from a RAID controller comprising multiple disk
drives aggregated together for larger capacity and redundancy. LUNs
represent a logical abstraction or, if you prefer, virtualization layer between the
physical disk device/volume and the applications.

A converged network adapter (CNA) is a single network interface card

(NIC) that contains both a Fibre Channel (FC) host bus adapter (HBA)
and a TCP/IP Ethernet NIC.

NFS is the "Network File System" for Unix and Linux operating systems.
It allows files to be shared transparently between servers, desktops,
laptops etc. It is a client/server application that allows a user to view,
store and update files on a remote computer as though they were on
their own computer. Using NFS, the user or a system administrator can
mount all or a portion of a file system

CIFS is the "Common Internet File System" used by Windows operating

systems for file sharing. CIFS uses the client/server programming model. A
client program makes a request of a server program (usually in another
computer) for access to a file or to pass a message to a program that runs in
the server computer. The server takes the requested action and returns a
response. CIFS is a public or open variation of the Server Message Block
Protocol (SMB) developed and used by Microsoft, and it uses the TCP/IP
protocol.

The Wires
--NAS uses TCP/IP Networks: Ethernet, FDDI, ATM (perhaps TCP/IP over Fibre
Channel someday)
--SAN uses Fibre Channel
--Both NAS and SAN can be accessed through a VPN for security

The Protocols
--NAS uses TCP/IP and NFS/CIFS/HTTP
--SAN uses Encapsulated SCSI