a more substantial piece on NAS (on offense intended).
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VAR Business
December 20, 1999, Issue: 1532
Section: Mass Storage Quarterly
NAS Gains Mass Appeal -- The technology is moving out of niche applications and into the mainstream
Jan Stafford
A booming Internet market and new technologies born of "big-time R&D" are propelling network attached storage (NAS) appliances out of niche applications and into the mainstream. NAS revenue is growing by 54 percent annually, rising from $540 million in 1998 to $850 million this year. Mass appeal comes next, with a $5.1 billion NAS take by 2003, according to predictions by International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass.
NAS is the star pupil in the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" school of IT solutions. This plug-and-play turnkey, single-purpose server puts disk drives, operating system, redundancy and power supplies in one integrated package. A mature technology that offers a simple way to offload storage from file servers, NAS implementation looks like child's play when compared to that technology with the mirror-image acronym, storage area networks (SAN).
"NAS simplicity, functionality, performance, reliability and scalability has converged with the needs of the Internet market," says Ray Cosyn, director of marketing for Auspex Systems Inc., an NAS vendor. "It will take five years for an immature, complex technology like SAN to be where NAS is today, and that's why businesses will go with NAS first."
NAS appliances are still streamlined, single-function servers, but vendors have packed them with management and performance capabilities far beyond that of their predecessors.
Although it has been around since the late '80s, NAS isn't a well-known technology. Awareness is growing, however, because NAS' single-purpose focus makes it easier to manage, store and optimize network resources.
"NAS fits well in the dot com world where files must be served up quickly," says Amy Rao, CEO of Integrated Archive Systems Inc., an NAS VAR in Palo Alto, Calif. "NAS does the job faster than a general purpose server does and is easier to install, manage and maintain."
Although they're still single-function focused thin servers, NAS appliances have been pumped up to meet the all-day, all-night demands of the Internet. "There's been some big-time R&D," says Howie Wilcox, corporate evangelist for Network Appliance Inc. Interoperability, scalability, performance, manageability and connectivity have all been enhanced without messing up the value proposition of NAS: simplicity. Some of those improvements include:
- Once homogeneous, most NAS devices now support multiple operating systems. Many allow a single copy of data to be shared between OSs.
- NAS connectivity options have expanded. The Auspex NS2000 NAS appliance, for example, supports 36 network connections.
- Disaster recovery software has been added. Snapshot and remote mirroring software, for instance, is embedded in Network Appliance's NAS servers. You can go back a second before a disaster and recover data automatically saved in a snapshot, says Wilcox.
- NAS storage capacity has more than doubled every year for the past five years. Maximum capacity for NAS boxes used to be 100 MB, says Cosyn. Now they scale up to 9 terabytes.
- New NAS management tools with point-and-click GUIs enable businesses to get a better handle on storage and data management. Most allow administration from a standard Web browser and offer diagnostics and notification of problems automatically.
- New in 1999 to NAS are clustering capabilities that put availability worries to rest. "Clustered failover from one Network Appliance box to another is very attractive to 24/7 businesses," says Rao.
- Network Appliance and Legato Systems introduced a high-availability solution starting at $6,000. It combines Legato Cluster's continuous access to applications with NetApp Clustered Failover software's fail-safe access to data stored on NetApp NAS devices.
Other systems will be powered by Veritas Software Corp.'s Veritas Cluster Server, which will soon ship in a version with special agents to handle NAS appliances.
- System reliability is almost near-perfect, with up to 99.993 percent uptime in some NAS devices.
- NAS devices are more scalable and easier to expand and upgrade today.
Instead of doing a hardware upgrade on drives after hours with the server down, "I can walk in and plug in an NAS without taking anything down," says Michael Yuschak, owner of Source Systems L.L.C., a Neptune, N.J.-based network systems VAR. "NAS saves time in getting storage on networks."
Sidebar: Sampling NAS Products
There are NAS devices for all sizes of businesses, from one- or two-drive solutions to enterprise systems.
- Quantum took NAS to an all-time low price point this fall with the $499 10-GB Snap Server 1000. It simultaneously supports multiple platforms and connections.
- Still on the low end is SciNet's $1,195, 20-GB Blazer, designed for small businesses where RAID and redundant power supply are not cost effective.
- In the midrange is Connex N3000, which offers one to six Ultra2SCSI LVD disk drives, 90-GB capacity, scalable RAID 5 storage and support for heterogeneous environments. A three-drive N3000 sells for about $7,000. There's also a $12,000, six-drive N3000.
- Network Appliance's F760 is a scalable enterprise-class appliance with multiterabyte storage capability. It includes backup software and costs roughly $80,000.
Sidebar: Qualifying NAS Customers
Not all network attached storage (NAS) devices are created equal. "It's important to match the capability of the device to the environment," says Steve Crandell, president of Excel Computer Inc., an NAS VAR in Carrollton, Texas. He offers three basic qualifying questions to ask prospective customers and the reasons why those questions are important:
- What operating systems need to be supported? (Some units support just one or two.)
- Does the unit's capacity need to be expandable? (Some units have maximum expansion limits.)
- Is fault-tolerant storage needed? (This separates low-end NAS units from more powerful RAID array-supporting NAS devices.) |
