One of the largest challenges of today?s enterprises consists of finding a solution for the permanently increasing data flood. Not only higher storage capacities are needed, also a guarantee for high access speed on data, their security and their consistency are requirements of new storage technologies. These rising demands for the availability and capacity of the today's data storage lead to the fact that conventional storage concepts as DAS (Direct Attached Storage) are becoming increasingly more complex and thus the administration more difficult. Increased storage concepts are being used which are centrally managed and are particularly designed for high availability and performance. Especially SAN (Storage Area Network) and NAS (Network Attached Storage) are counted to these storage concepts. They represent a common topic in computer technical literature, where daily new achievements and changes are reported.

This paper describes the most important characteristics of modern storage concepts their suppliers and products. It provides an objective view on storage solutions at the today's market and offers a mental incentive for future solutions. The document gives valuable ideas to companies and the ZHW (Zurcher Hochschule Winterthur) for implementing storage solutions and provides founded knowledge on overall storage solutions for advanced users as for beginners. In a separate chapter of the documentation a NAS test environment is described, which is to support the students of the computer engineering classes from the practical side. The hardware and software for the NAS test environment have also been likewise ordered by us and implemented in the context of this dissertation. For the theoretical part the students receive training course documents to the topic ?mass storage concepts? which we created and which shall provide an optimal view on modern storage solutions.