Near-Line Storage

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Near-Line Storage Mean?

Near-line storage is a type of storage medium that is external to a computer and provides quick and scalable access to storage devices/capacity within an IT environment. This term refers to any storage architecture, infrastructure or technology that resides between online and offline storage sources.

Advertisements

Techopedia Explains Near-Line Storage

Near-line storage is primarily used in enterprise-class data centers, data warehouses and IT environments. It is most often used to store data permanently and provide on-demand access to stored data, usually over a network/Internet connection. It cannot be immediately provisioned but doesn’t require any manual help as is required in removable or offline storage.

Near-line storage devices include massive array of idle disks (MAID), automated tape libraries and SATA based disk RAID systems.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.