Bridge the SAN and NAS Chasm
Storage Magazine is new, but they've got some interesting articles.
I'm posting this one as an illustration of the fact that so many players are in the competitive mix.
storagemagazine.techtarget.com
Issue: Apr 2002
Bridge the SAN and NAS Chasm
Choosing between a fast, centralized SAN, and an easy-to-implement, file-sharing NAS can be an "agonizing" decision, says Mark Amelang, director of marketing at Auspex Systems, a longtime NAS vendor.
For example, highly technical users such as engineers, who were once responsible for procuring their own IT equipment, often bought high-performance NAS boxes in order to be able to share files across platforms.
But increasingly, buying storage is done by mainstream IT departments, which tend to favor SANs for their management and consolidation benefits - if not for multiplatform file sharing.
Some storage vendors do sell offerings that put a "NAS head" on a back-end SAN storage pool. But these products are largely proprietary, Amelang says, and don't work in heterogeneous storage environments.
EMC customers, for example, can get the benefits of a shared NAS/SAN infrastructure with Celerra, a NAS server which relies on the EMC's Symmetrix array for storage.
Compaq, too, offers a Celerra-like product, the StorageWorks NAS Executor E7000, for use in Compaq storage environments.
Auspex's approach to bridging the SAN/NAS chasm is its new NSc3000, a network storage "controller" that sits on the LAN, but hooks into Fibre Channel-based disk arrays from vendors such as Compaq, EMC, LSI, and HDS. Priced at "well under" $50,000, the NSc3000 delivers throughput of about 20,000 IOPS.
Storage software vendor Veritas can also serve up block-level data to endusers with its ServPoint Appliance for SAN - software which, when loaded onto a Sun Solaris server, acts as an intermediary between LAN clients and a back-end Fibre Channel SAN. The software-only license costs about $25,000.
In addition to providing file-based access to endusers, SAN/NAS convergence products can help organizations make better use of their SAN infrastructure. Up to 30% of SAN capacity is usually underutilized, Amelang claims, simply because there aren't enough applications requiring block-level data access. By reassigning SAN storage to file serving applications, IT can easily take advantage of these expensive resources.
|
