This can often be confusing once you read vendors' marketing
materials. Simply stated,
unified storage [or multiprotocol storage]
refers to a single storage system that can support both
file access and
block access. That means I can use it for
file systems and storing file data; or I can use an application
that does block-based
I/O right to that storage system. That
[unified or multiprotocol] storage system is really operating in
two modes: block and file.
Listen to the
unified storage FAQ audiocast.
Go to the beginning of the
Unified Storage FAQ Guide.