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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (115527)	6/12/2000 3:17:00 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571928

Ted, OFF TOPIC, STORAGE, here's another article about storage, including a bit on NAS vs. SAN. The author thinks SAN will win out, at least in the battle for the enterprise storage dollar, which is where most of the money ought to be, I think. The NAS/SAN part: ENTER NAS AND SAN To address these shortcomings, two novel approaches to storage have emerged, to considerable fanfare in the trade press. The new contenders?network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs)?have created substantial market confusion, due in part to the awkward but similar acronyms by which they are usually known. NAS involves attaching a ?thin? server dedicated solely to storage functions, such as querying and retrieval, directly to a company?s local-area network (LAN). Therefore, broader functions, notably file and print sharing and application serving, don?t interfere with the storage unit?s performance. This approach also reduces the burden on general-purpose servers, which are freed from storage responsibilities. Furthermore, in a NAS system, server and storage capacity scale in lockstep; in other words, when you purchase a NAS box to increase your storage, you get only the additional server capacity you need. NAS devices are also easy to install and manage. However, in large enterprises, which typically have vast quantities of stored data, NAS is not a practical solution: the movement of data among NAS boxes or storage devices consumes much of the precious bandwidth of the LANs to which they are attached, slowing down those networks considerably. NAS is likely to find a healthy market among small and midsize companies, where ease of use is critical and bandwidth constraints are less troublesome. To solve the storage problems of larger enterprises, SANs have entered the ring. Unlike a NAS?a freestanding device plugged into a network?a SAN is a series of storage devices making up its own network, separate from the LAN. In a common kind of SAN, a switch lies at the center of the network. On one side of the switch, a number of storage devices link up to form a storage network; on the other side lie the main LAN?s servers, which give anyone on the LAN access to any storage device. Because a SAN separates storage from the servers, the technology offers many of the advantages of NAS boxes: more efficient capacity utilization, greater tolerance of system failures, and better server performance. And because a SAN constitutes a parallel network, most storage-related activities never touch the LAN?a compelling advantage for companies whose LANs are overburdened. The only real drawback of the SAN technology is its immaturity; important features, such as the ability to share data among servers running on different platforms, are still under development. WHO WILL RULE? SANs are therefore the likely winner in the battle for the enterprise storage dollar. Leading hardware storage players?including Compaq, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM?are lining up behind this technology. Considerable revenue is at risk; an open SAN architecture threatens to do to captive storage markets what EMC did to IBM nearly a decade ago. The whole article: 209.172.171.93 Tony