More complaints from buck about SAN and NAS distinctions
1) decrease the effort required to manage storage;
2) increase the rate at which data can be accessed;
3) offload the overhead of serving data off of the application servers;
4) share data between many heterogenous (UNIX/Windows/HTTP) application servers;
5) minimize the effort required to expand storage capacity, and
6) distribute the data on filers throughout the enterprise (if desired) while
7) allowing centralized and distributed adminisration of the filers.
I would contend, and so would EMC, IBM, DELL, CPQ, HWP, and others that SANs achieve the same goals defined here, with better (much, much better) performance and far, far better return on existing investment.
EMC's vision is to centralize an enterprise's data storage
I would wager that EMC has no desire to centralize most company's storage. In their market space, loosely defined as the Global 2000, such a centralization would be impossible. They do believe that it is easier to administer a SAN for huge amounts of data (which I define as greater than 1TB) than it is to administer a NAS. The practices and procedures and policies are already in place to administer a SAN. For amounts of data less than that, then NAS filers from NTAP make perfect sense. NTAP filers are perfect for the edge, and I applaud companies' decisions to use them.
...minimizing the total cost of managing that data and maximizing the end user's level of access (speed adn availability) to that data
Make no mistake that managing a NAS filer is any easier than managing any other server on a network. And this one has a special, purpose-built OS, with vagaries of protocol that are foreign to most, if not all, enterprise storage management personnel. Also make no mistake that data served thru ethernet of any flavor is served faster than data served from an I/O channel like SCSI or Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel SANs increase data availability beyond that of filers, too. A SAN allows data access from any other server should the primary server go down. An end user has no way to access the data on a filer that goes down...unless you've bought a mirror-image NAS filer.
Let me take a moment here to state that I am long on both EMC and NTAP, both of whom I consider to be Gorillas. The technical discussion I am boring you with has nothing, or very little, to do with the long-term (5+ yrs) prospects for these companies. I think it's important to the thread that there are other viewpoints about SAN and NAS besides NetApps, though, and that they have a valid technical foundation. I personally can't wait for the day when these distinctions are gone, and end users are looking for the right tool for the job.
Perhaps we should just go start a consultancy that ties the two together seamlessly. Wanna give it a go, DownSouth? You be CEO...
buck |
