Moderator: Peter Burris
Analyst: David Floyer
In the last few years, we've seen the emergence of a high end in the network attached storage (NAS) market as suppliers and users recognize the business benefits of both SAN (storage area network) and NAS, and realize the need for greater differentiation of NAS solutions. To put this in perspective, recall that most disk-oriented storage solutions have been differentiated along one of two dimensions:
- is the storage subsystem direct or network attached?; and
- does the storage subsystem use a block or stateful protocol or a routed and state-less protocol?
The emergence of NAS coincided with the introduction of IP as the fundamental routing protocol between mainly file-oriented network servers and the use of specialized NAS storage subsystems for storing mainly stateless files such as email archives, Web files or media files. As a consequence of this simple advance in utilizing IP-oriented protocols to route storage data from lower cost devices to applications that did not require the overhead of state management, the NAS market took off. This has led to increased competition between traditional NAS players like NetApp and traditional block-oriented or SAN companies like EMC about which technology is most suitable at the very high end of the market.
What has become clear is that for applications that are truly stateful and require a block-oriented protocol like big database OLTP applications, there is no substitute for block- oriented storage subsystems that are commonly referred to as SAN from companies like EMC, Hitachi and IBM. However, as the debates regarding the suitability of NAS as a substitute for SAN start to abate, there's an increased recognition that big NAS is a sector that deserves special investment, requires specific innovation and should be uniquely exploited by users.
Here we are talking about subsystems that can support over 200,000 I/O's per second, still less than the ~1M - 2M+ I/O's per second on big block-oriented storage subsystems, but much higher than has been traditionally associated with NAS.
The emergence of these high end NAS systems means that users for the first time can cost-effectively begin thinking about pursuing three goals: 1) consolidating their NAS subsystems into a more manageable set of resources that better satisfy increasingly strict laws on compliance, for email archiving and other digital file archiving applications; 2) that it can speed the introduction of storage virtualization technologies into IT organizations so that the benefits of storage virtualization can start to be realized sooner and 3) that the skills and methods associated with storage-level metadata management can be supported more readily by high end NAS subsystems and that these skills learned early can be adopted across an array of storage technologies.
Action Item: The high end NAS marketplace has been identified for both specific innovation and specific application. Users should begin considering and exploiting these technologies for those stateless applications that nonetheless for either legal or competitive reasons are on a vector that requires increasingly high performance.
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