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Data Centers

NAS Market Heats Up: Page 2 of 2

Interest seems to be picking up in the mid-range unified storage space lately. In the past month or so, we've seen Iomega and NetGear move up market with 12-drive systems with enough intestinal fortitude to host Exchange and VMware via iSCSI. Moving up-market, Xiotech, Compellent and Nimbus have all announced higher-end NAS/block systems, and rumors have been floating around that EMC is about to merge their Clariion and Celerra lines.
Howard Marks
May 10, 2010

When most block-storage vendors OEM a NAS head, they slap their logo on the splash screen and call the system integrated. Users soon discover that they need to provision LUNs through the block-array user interface and manage the file system through the completely unrelated NAS UI.  Expanding a file system on a badly integrated solution means flipping back and forth between the two, growing the LUN and then telling the file system to recognize the additional space. Compellent has gone the extra mile and integrated NAS management into their Storage Center user interface, solving that problem.

My one disappointment with zNAS is that Compellent is only supporting flash memory in the Storage Center array.  ZFS can use internal flash for logging as a read cache but Compellent hasn't enabled these functions, relying instead on automatic tiering and STEC SSDs in the array. Some low-cost MLC in the NAS head could be a cost-effective performance boost.

So, are these really unified storage systems?  iSCSI and FC block access bypasses the NAS head to go directly to the block array, so even if the file UI is integrated, the networking isn't. NetApp, Nimbus and similar vendors use a single-storage system by building block LUNs as files in the file system.

My friend Stephen Foskett then asks, in a great blog post: "Why don't storage guys take NAS seriously" I'm still thinking about that, but expect I'll have an answer in a future blog post.

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