Keep in mind that SAN and NAS are merely the architectures over which the data sits on file systems.
At the heart of migrating from SAN to NAS is simply and literally copying files from one to the other. No program changes are required.
But, of course, the issues come to the front when you have a staff managing, for example, a Symmetrix system. They have set up systems for load balancing, backup procedures, etc. A good deal of planning and re-thinking of these procedures is required, depending on the level of complexity that the folks have put into their implementation of the Symmetrix system.
A more likely scenario is an evolutionary one, where the customer is fielding a new application or decides to use the features of an NTAP end-to-end content management system. In such cases, the NTAP filer would be rolled in and the new application would be implemented on the filer(s) and NetCache appliances.
Realize that the Symmetrix nor the NTAP systems are running applications. The apps are running on NT/UNIX/S390 app servers that are either a) channel connected (SCSI) to the Symmetrix system, which looks like a big disk drive to the app server OS; or b) LAN connected to the NTAP filer, which looks like another UNIX and/or NT server to the app server.
You could have an app server connected to both Symmetrix and NTAP systems--no problem. |
