Storage Area Network (SAN) can provide extremely fast and robust architecture to centralize your data storage environment, thru the use of Fiber Channel and or iSCSI protocols.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) architecture provides multiprotocol file sharing of data delivered over the standard Ethernet network, sharing of Windows and/or UNIX data-sets.

Internally Virtualized Storage provides the ability to create pools of disks to ensure that a given dataset can access as many disk spindles as possible to provide optimal performance. Eases the burden on system administration.
Externally Virtualized Storage allows multiple storage systems to be seamlessly connected together using a resilient, more robust architecture, providing the ability to aggregate all the resources from those various storage systems.

Network Based Virtualization moves the virtualization process into the storage network, allowing aggregation of multiple components, not thru a system, but thru the storage network itself.

Provides the ability to perform snapshots, replication, and many others features across the various storage systems on the network.

Tiered Storage Architectures provides the functionality for data to transparently move to different levels of storage in the architecture based on usage, age, or performance.

Thin Provisioning is a function to allow storage managers to over-provision their logical units without actually needing the upfront capacity to do so, thus allowing the future allocation of storage to be performed in a just-as-needed basis.

Storage Consolidation centralizes and shares storage resources across various server and storage platforms, guaranteeing that the maximum amount storage utilization can be maintained.