NAS Network Attached Storage

NAS - Network Attached Storage

By Ben Padnos
Expert Author
Article Date: 2006-06-26

Today's businesses are digitized, online, and growing. Organizations of all sizes continue to generate increasing amounts of data, largely because of a growing number of applications and users generating and accessing data.

The productivity and viability of organizations are becoming ever more reliant on the ability to store, organize, and share this business information.

One of the largest areas of growth, especially within enterprise organizations, is expected to be in file-level services, with activity related to file-based data continuing to grow as organizations:

Increasingly rely on digitization of data and business information in the form of files.

Experience growing numbers of users generating and/or accessing the files.

Demand the ability to share files in an efficient manner to improve productivity or help achieve business goals.

Generate larger files with continuing advancements in application features, graphics, and processor power.

Generate more files, particularly as a result of increased email activity and collaboration.

Address business governance and regulatory compliance, which will increase and complicate the retention of business information, forcing IT managers to develop ways to save more (or all) files generated for longer periods of time.

As a result of growing file-related activity, CIOs and IT managers are constantly looking for methods to store and manage their business information in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. With respect to file-level data, the increased amount of activity will continue to add to the existing stress of IT budgets and resources. Many administrators are looking to optimize the value of their IT infrastructures by leveraging fewer suppliers that can deliver as much end-to-end value as possible in attempts to achieve a total IT or storage solution.

NAS Network Attached Storage : SUN Microsystems

One solution on the market today that is helping customers address many desired requirements of enterprise file sharing comes from Sun Microsystems and its line of NAS products.

Sun offers three NAS products, each of which employs hardware-based RAID 5 and can simultaneously support users among multiple platforms including Windows, UNIX, and Linux via the included CIFS (SMB), NFS (v2 and v3), and FTP protocols. In addition, each NAS appliance offers iSCSI support as a target for the Microsoft Software iSCSI initiator.

The products are as follows:

Sun StorEdge 5210 NAS Appliance, which scales up to 6.1TB of SCSI-based capacity.

Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS Appliance, which offers the ability to cluster and mix Fibre Channel (FC) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives, scaling up to 134TB (FC) or 179TB (SATA) raw capacity.

Sun StorEdge 5310 NAS Gateway System, which offers the separation of the NAS file system from the back-end storage, enabling flexibility to apply file-level services to existing or complementary pools of Storage Area Networks (SANs).

Sun's StorEdge QFS shared file system software provides high-performance file sharing among servers deployed in a SAN environment, while the StorEdge SAM FS file system provides archiving capabilities to help manage and protect file-level data.

About the Author:
Ben Padnos is an Internet Enterpreneur based in Manhattan Beach, California and enjoys writing on various subjects.

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