Uh oh. Now you're playing with all your marbles in public.
That's your problem right there. You view SAN and NAS as mutually exclusive. Black vs white. BLUE marbles vs RED marbles.
Are you threatening to drown yourself in shallow waters again?
How much freakin' clearer can it get?
Again, the lifeline, err, clue.
Limitations of file system storage
With all of these advantages, it is surprising that the NAS model isn't dominant. The fact is, there are limitations in the areas of performance, impact on host processing, scalability, and "unsettled writes" that prevent them from being effective in some markets or applications......
.....So why isn't SAFS pervasive and taking the NAS market by storm? The reasons are related to evolution. SAFS grew up in the media world, where movie creation and graphic arts professionals needed to process huge files between peer machines. After a number of years and technology innovations, SAN software developers began to develop methods of file-level sharing on direct-attached storage devices. Slowly, the concept of a hybrid LAN/SAN became accepted. Still, the technology was limited primarily to high-end media and data-warehousing sites.
At the same time, NAS was becoming increasingly popular, but in different market segments-mainly the general enterprise computing space. The two camps were basically unaware of each other. Today, however, most NAS players are aware of how simple it is for them to expose their storage to SAFS hosts, and we may see many new product offerings hitting the streets. Stay tuned.
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