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Virtualizing NAS for Green Storage: Page 3 of 5

The independent scaling of NAS nodes and physical storage provides maximum flexibility, allowing specific growth where the need is the greatest. This results in power savings. In contrast, traditional NAS calls for the purchase of capacity and performance together when only one is needed, thus wasting power.

Things to look for
The virtualized NAS cluster should be able to mix different node types. This allows for file systems that require greater performance to be assigned to nodes in the cluster that can deliver more performance. Slower nodes can be leveraged in the case of a failure.

Being able to cluster different types of nodes also provides investment protection. With virtualized NAS clusters, older technology can be retained while moving some nodes to faster, more reliable, and more power-efficient platforms as those become available.

Support of mixed virtualized nodes also helps eliminate full-scale migration, a problem for traditional NAS. With mixed nodes, manageable migrations can happen over time or immediately – as the more advanced nodes become available. As the NAS cluster grows, this is a key requirement. When dealing with data stores measured in petabytes, it is almost impossible to move all the data to a new platform at once.

A common challenge with simply building a large NAS or file server is that there is a lack of granularity and as a result, most of the NAS is idle. With a virtualized NAS cluster, not only can adding a node increase the performance, the services the nodes provide can be virtualized. Each node in the grid can run multiple virtual file servers if needed. This not only allows for greater granularity and for security to support department-level requirements within the organization, it also significantly helps with the initial migration to the NAS.