Coping With the Nasty Side of NAS

It's every IT exec's worst nightmare: Today's solution turns into tomorrow's problem. Unfortunately, this scenario has played out in all too many enterprises with regard to network-attached storage (NAS).

Over the years, companies embraced NAS like almost no other concept in storage, plunking hordes of these devices onto their networks. So what if you had to install yet another box when you reached capacity? For quickly serving up files, NAS is about as easy as it gets.

Then came the letdown: These monolithic devices couldn't think outside the box, as it were. With specialized NAS file systems residing all alone within each unit, incapable of communicating with other, like-minded units, storage folks found themselves having to babysit each device individually. Hence, the dreaded "islands of storage" problem.

A few concurrent trends have given hope for NAS consolidation. These include converging NAS and SAN, along with reworking NAS to make it a heartier enterprise solution on its own.

As we discuss in this month's Byte and Switch Insider report, NAS Update: Survival of the Fittest, these trends have accelerated considerably in the past year. There are more NAS products available than ever, and a growing roster of suppliers large and small show no sign of slowing down their NAS development.A highlight of all this activity and the industry's most ambitious NAS effort – involves the convergence of NAS and SAN. This appears to be happening in two phases:

While the industry focuses on marrying SAN and NAS, there are other trends attempting to bust the nastier side of NAS. Products have emerged that scale well beyond the limits of their predecessors. Many of these newbies achieve this goal through file systems that can be distributed or clustered across numerous physical devices.

These systems mostly target high-end niches now, but they're poised for wider appeal. They'll have an uphill battle against the dominant NAS players – NetApp (which snapped up Spinnaker for exactly this purpose) and EMC – but their approaches look promising, to say the least.A new class of products has also arisen that ties together multiple NAS devices (and other storage gear, for that matter) to make it all appear as one big pool of storage to attached servers. These products lack their own file systems, but they consolidate storage nonetheless.

All of this bodes well for NAS in general. Proceeding apace, this evolution ensures a survival of the fittest – if not for vendors, then for the technologies that will help enterprises address the nasty side of NAS.

— Brett Mendel, Senior Analyst, Byte and Switch Insider

NAS Update: Survival of the Fittest is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Byte and Switch Insider, priced at $1,350. Individual reports are available for $900.

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