Mike:
I think that you might be correct on the who-buys-it, but keep in mind that NAS has unlimited scalability because if you need more storage, you can just plug another one in. It would be interesting to see a break out of NTAP's numbers as far as who sales are going to. One important (technical) thing to remember is that NAS is serverless, so the server bottleneck (that may exist) is removed, which makes file access faster. Faster then SAN? Perhaps our storage expert DownSouth could shed some light on the issue ;) . In the mean time, I found some more links for those interested in the storage area:
Experts recommendations for various typed of network storage:
zdnet.com
Enterprise-Wide Network Storage Architectures (definitions):
zdnet.com
A run down on NAS & SAN:
zdnet.com
In depth look at NAS:
nwc.com
and finally...
(from nwc.com )
Mentions the three classes of NAS devices
While the so-called experts debated the death of SCSI and the rise of the Storage Area Network (SAN), a relatively old technology with a new mission stole the thunder in the storage arena last year.
Network Attached Storage (NAS) quickly became a hot topic with its ability to connect petabytes of data directly to any network, bypassing server I/O bottlenecks and putting huge amounts of storage instantly online.
When we examined the network storage market, it became clear that there were at least three distinct categories of products:
small business NAS devices with about 20 GBs of storage; departmental or workgroup devices with less than 100 GBs; and full-blown enterprise
devices with more than 100 GBs. We looked at several of the enterprise
class devices, and the clear overall winner was Network Appliance's
Network Appliance Filer 760.
The rack-mounted and thoroughly modular NetApp Filer not only served
up superior performance on our benchmarks, it also delivered a host of
administrative control. This $176,400 system served up 232 GB of data
storage and 1 GB of RAM. The system had SCSI, FC-AL, 10/100BASE-T and RS-232 ports, plus a pair of quad 10/100BASE-T adapters. With support for both NFS and CIFS protocols, the unit is ready to rock with Unix or Windows in an instant.
Despite the complexity of the system, setup was remarkably easy, thanks largely to an excellent set of administrative tools and well-designed components. Overall, we cannot think of another product that comes closer to delivering nirvana on a set of platters for enterprise storage administration.
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Lots of food for thought, sorry 'bout that ;) . Don't get me wrong, there is lots of room for both SAN's and NAS's. I just think that NAS might be overshadowed by SAN, which may make it a good area to invest in. BWDIK.... :)
Justin |
