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Storage

essential guide

NAS:
Your options

NAS systems range from standalone desktop boxes to huge clusters that scale
for capacity and performance and deliver billions of files from parallel file
systems. Find out what you need in our top-to-bottom guide to the NAS market.

also:

what the future

Scale-out NAS

Scale-out vs Traditional

holds for nas

Traditional NAS

Desktop NAS

editorial * antony adshead

The present NAS

market: What does it
hold for the future?
Lets look at the NAS market to see what
type of NAS is right for you, and how that
will change in the coming years.
Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

is a great starting point for evaluating the market and deciding what type of NAS is right for you. Ill run through
the key areas we cover and suggest some technology changes I
think well see in the coming years.
In this guide we divide the NAS market into three key levels.
Firstly, there is the high-end NAS market. This is characterised
by the use of scale-out or clustered systems. These stretch to capacities in the tens of petabytes with massive throughput levels
and parallel file systems that provide access to all files on all connected device nodes in the cluster. Crucially also, adding nodes
adds processing power and/or disk capacity. This end of the market is driven by the need to store huge amounts of files, including
virtual machine images, as well as the need for rapid access that
multiplies to IOPS rates in the hundreds of thousands per second

his Essential Guide

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

as nodes are added.

Next are the entry-level and medium-sized traditional NAS products. These can run to capacities of several hundred terabytes but
do not have scale-out capabilities, so theres the risk of running
up against the limits of processing power or memory; the file systems of these arrays typically dont span multiple units so you may
end up with siloed file systems in each device. That said, theres a
healthy NAS midmarket and vendors often include advanced features such as forms of replication and block access via
Vendors often include
iSCSI, which effectively makes
advanced features
many of these products multisuch as forms of
protocol storage.
Finally, there is desktop
replication and block
NAS, which is really just the
access via iSCSI.
smallest capacity and performance end of the traditional NAS market. These devices are aimed at small businesses and
larger ones that need local storage in an office or remote location.
And here again vendors are providing features that were once only
found in enterprise devices.
Also, strictly speaking, part of the NAS world is HPC (high-performance computing) storage, which also deals in very large amounts
of files and extremely high performance but thats outside the
scope of this guide. You can read about it here though.
Those are pretty much the main contours of NAS technology at
present, with two things that stand out that indicate future directions of development.
The first is rise of scale-out capability, which is something that
ought to become commonplace in devices at all levels of the NAS
market. There seem to me to be good reasons to do so. Even if customers arent demanding it yet, it should be a selling point for NAS
vendors. After all, scale-out capabilities allow customers to add

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

further units that build capacity and performance, while simultaneously providing an easier-to-manage cluster of file storage rather than a collection of siloed devices, each requiring individual administrative attention.
At present its only the high end that does scale-out, but its a
feature built into controller operating systems that should be portable to devices down the range. If I was a customer for midrange NAS Id want to know why I wasnt being allowed to build on
my investment as I added further hardware from a vendor to my
estate.
The second thing is the likely development of cleverer ways
of providing better performance. At present NAS performance is
largely enhanced by buying bigger trad NAS boxes or adding processing power and throughput with the addition of nodes in clustered NAS configurations. But, there may well be more efficient
ways to speed access times and throughput rates.
In the SAN world were seeing some newcomers do interesting
things that combine flash, spinning disk and sometimes data deduplication. The principle here is to put the most used data on the
fastest storage media and shift data between those different tiers;
Tintri, NexGen and Nutanix do this, for example.
NetApp applied the idea of using a flash cache for the most
used data in a NAS filer some time ago. Now Avere has taken that
principle and applied flash caching to hot data across numerous
NAS devices. Its a fairly lonely furrow, but it could be a taste of
things to come. n
Antony Adshead is bureau chief of SearchStorage.co.UK.

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Product roundup:
Scale-out NAS
meets unstructured
data challenge
We examine how scale-out NAS products from
EMC Isilon and NetApp have been updated since
last year and delve into other vendors that offer
products in that space. by Chris Evans
Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

I
n 2011,

SearchStorage.co.UK looked at the scale-out NAS market

and how the major players are implementing that technology.
Products from EMC Isilon and NetApp have been updated since
then and other companies now offer products in the scale-out NAS
space: HDS/BlueArc, Avere, Panasas and Oracle.
EMC enhanced its Isilon scale-out NAS platform with 3 TB enterprise-class hard drives and now provides up to 15 PB of capacity in
a single Isilon file system.
And in June 2011, EMC Isilon announced it had submitted benchmark tests to the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC)
that demonstrated NFS performance of 1.1 million IOPS and CIFS
performance of 1.6 million IOPS. The configuration was based on a
140-node cluster of Isilon S200 arrays with 864 TB of storage.
Not to be outdone, NetApp followed up in early November of

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

2011 by submitting a benchmark test to SPEC with a 24-node cluster deployment of FAS6240 arrays in Data Ontap 8 Cluster Mode
with 1.51 million IOPS. This performance was achieved with only
574 TB of storage capacity. For some vendors, being the fastest
seems to be important to demonstrate their scalability credentials.
Since then, however, Avere said it has leapfrogged NetApp with
a result of 1.56 million IOPS on the same SPEC test.
NetApp has also upgraded Data Ontap to Version 8.1. This has
added a number of storage efficiency features to Data Ontaps
cluster mode, including block-level deduplication, flash cache,
cloning and SnapMirror asynchronous mirroring. Scale-out block
access has also been added, but the fundamental issues with NetApps scale-out model that limit its file system size have not been
addressed. Users must also still decide between Version 8.1 or socalled 7-modeie, non-clusteredat install.
Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

BlueArc Set for a Scale-out NAS Market Boost from HDS

BlueArc was founded in 1998 in the UK. Hitachi Data Systems has
sold BlueArc NAS through an OEM deal since 2006, and it acquired
BlueArc in September 2011 for $600 million. BlueArc takes a different approach to high-performance scale-out NAS by using dedicated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) within its architecture
to deliver very high scalability and capacity within a single node.
Unlike commodity CPUs, FPGAs are customisable to specific tasks
and can be configured to run different processes concurrently.
BlueArcs Titan Series can scale to 16 PB within a single
namespace, with 20 Gbps performance in an eight-node cluster.
The use of dedicated hardware chips differentiates BlueArc from
other vendors in the market today. Most manufacturers have chosen to build their solutions using commodity hardware components, such as Intel Xeon processors.
Now that HDS owns BlueArc, industry observers expect it to

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

accelerate its sales and the development of technology by adding more resources than BlueArc could afford as an independent
company.

Avere Systems Speeds up Existing NAS Farms

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

Avere Systems attacks the scale-out NAS market from a different

angle. It produces a series of storage appliances that accelerate
the performance of existing NAS deployments within an organisation.
Averes FXT-series appliances use DRAM, NVRAM (non-volatile
RAM) and either solid-state drives or traditional hard disk drives to
provide cached access to the most active data within an existing
NAS farm.
Typically, in many organisations the working set of active data
within a NAS cluster can be as low as 10% of overall capacity. So,
Avere focuses its appliances at delivering access to that working
set, while allowing the majority of the data to sit on cheaper traditional NAS products.
Besides delivering a single namespace, Avere FXT appliances can
automatically tier data and deliver WAN caching. Organisations
that operate from multiple disparate locations, where an appliance
provides local access to data, have made use of these appliances.
The FXT series can scale to a maximum of 50 nodes, with the
high-end FXT 4500 providing 144 GB of DRAM, 2 GB of NVRAM and 3
TB of SSD.

Panasas Blade Approach

Panasas delivers scale-out NAS using a blade architecture. Its ActiveStor product family consists of director blades that manage file
I/O and storage blades that provide storage capacity. As many as 11
blades can be deployed in a single shelf in a number of configura-

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

tions, depending on the requirements for capacity or performance.

A single Panasas namespace can scale to 10 shelves per rack
and up to 10 racks. This gives a maximum capacity of 6 PB (using 3
TB drives) with 150 gigabytes per second throughput.
Panasas has taken an alternative approach to managing resiliency within its architecture. RAID is implemented at the object
level rather than the disk or block of traditional systems. Data is
distributed across blades and disks to deliver high resilience. In a
failure scenario, data rebuilds occur at the file level, providing faster access to recovered data.

Oracles ZFS Scales Hugely

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

Through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle offers the Sun

ZFS Storage Appliances.
These appliances use the ZFS file system. Developed by Sun Microsystems in 2004, ZFS (originally named Zettabyte File System)
can scale to a staggering 256 quadrillion zettabytes of storage.
ZFS uses a combination of
Developed by Sun
traditional storage and flash to
deliver high-performance I/O for
Microsystems in
both read and write data. The
2004, ZFS can scale
high-end Oracle ZFS Storage
to a staggering 256
7420 array scales to a maximum
quadrillion petabytes.
of 1.15 PB and can be deployed
in a clustered configuration.
Unstructured data is the fastest-growing type of data, and the
pure NFS market will soon be challenged by object storage vendors, who can deliver access to their products via NFS gateways.
Object storage arrays already offer higher scalability than NAS
and are seen as fundamental building blocks of cloud storage. n
Chris Evans is an independent consultant with Langton Blue.

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

SMB NAS product survey:

Non-scale-out/clustered
NAS still fills a need
Traditional, non-scale-out NAS still meets the
needs of SMBs despite the rise of clustered alternativesbut product categories are becoming
blurred with block access. by Martin Taylor

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

is a truly mature market but is also a rapidly changing one. Its latest iteration, clustered or scale-out NASwhich allows the linking of multiple NAS devices under a single file systemhas risen rapidly to meet organisations needs to store large
amounts of unstructured data. But, there is still a need for traditional NAS products to meet the demands of SMB NAS use cases
such as small business and departmental/branch office file serving.
While higher-end NAS products have gone scale-out/clustered,
SMB NAS products have in some cases evolved to offer iSCSI and
Fibre Channel block access connectivity options in addition to support for traditional NFS and CIFS protocols. In this they have arguably become multiprotocol storage subsystems, though majoring
in NAS. Other products have remained true to file access and added performance enhancers such as SSD.
he NAS market

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

In this article we examine some of the current offerings in the

non-scale-out SMB NAS marketplace for low and midrange use
cases and its benefits for organisations that want to consolidate
storage.

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

NetApp. NetApp virtually invented the NAS product space, or at

least made itself synonymous with it. Its FAS filer products can be
linked together to serve files from multiple nodes, but there are severe limits on this capability, and so it is not a truly scale-out NAS
product set. Products start at the entry-level FAS2000 range. The
FAS2220, for example, offers 12 onboard disk slots, externally expandable to 60, and a total capacity of 60 TB on either SAS or SATA
drives with Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Dual controllers in the
(FCoE) and iSCSI connectivity
same chassis powered
as well as NFS and CIFS file
by NetApp Data Ontap
access options. The hardware
comes bundled with an exprovide failover in
tensive range of NetApp softthe event of controller
ware, including options for
failure.
thin provisioning, snapshotting and data deduplication.
Optional extras can be added, such as remote-volume mirroring.
Dual controllers in the same chassis powered by the NetApp Data
Ontap operating system provide failover in the event of controller
failure. The range extends to include full-scale enterprise systems
in the FAS6000 family via the FAS3000 midrange devices.
EMC. Last year EMC merged its Celerra NAS and Clariion SAN
products into one unified storage line to face NetApp head on. The
result was the VNXe product line for smaller businesses; VNX in
the midrange; and the VNX Series Gateway, which is a NAS gateway add-on for EMC SANs.

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

There are two VNXe products that support NAS protocols and
iSCSI block access. The VNXe3100 is a 2U device with a maximum
of 96 SAS or nearline SAS drives, while the VNXe3300 can take 120
drives, including flash.
There are five midrange VNX devices: four in the VNX5000 series
adn the higher-end VNX7500. All are dual-controller. The VNX5000
series can contain from 75 to 500 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives, with
flash and SAS supported. The top-of-the-range VNX7500 can hold
1,000 drives. Protocols supported are NFS, CIFS, MPFS and pNFS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and FCoE. The devices also support object storage and have eight to 32 ports.

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

HP. HPs X1000 G2 Network Storage System is slightly less feature-rich than NetApps FAS2000 series and EMCs NX4. Powered by
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2, it offers iSCSI connectivity and
can be managed by HP X1800sb G2 Network Storage Blades. The
X1000 has a maximum raw capacity of 24 TB with either SATA or SAS
HPs X1000 has
drives. Its feature list also boasts
a maximum raw
file deduplication, quota managecapacity of 24 TB
ment, file screening, reporting, Miwith either SATA
crosoft Windows Volume Shadow
or SAS drives.
Copy Service (VSS) snapshots, Windows Active Directory integration
and Windows Distributed File System (DFS) Replication. In HP environments, administrators can make use of integration with other
HP products, such as the HP BladeSystem.
IBM. IBMs N-series system storage NAS range is provided as
OEM hardware from NetApp and offers iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel connectivity. The N3000 Express is the entry-level system
of the N series and is presented as a consolidation solution for
data formerly held in direct-attached storage (DAS). The rebadged

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

FAS2020 unit offers SAS or SATA disk types and features the NetApp Data Ontap operating system, which manages thin provisioning and dual-controller options for data protection. This fits into
a 24 TB array, which comes as standard with the initial N3000 2U
unit. The N series allows interoperability with external storage
units and controllers from higher up in the range. The N series is an
affordable small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) NAS solution
that can be scaled up easily to an enterprise-level array with minimal migration pain.

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

Dell. Dell offers a number of NAS and multiprotocol storage

product families, including the NX product lines. In the NX series,
the entry-level model is the tower-format NX200, which provides
capacity of up to 8 TB on four
hot-swappable SATA drives.
The NX3000 and
Meanwhile, the NX300 is NAS
NX3100 offer CIFS
protocol-only, 1U in size and
and NFS access, with
provides up to 8 TB of internal capacity. The NX3000 and
optional iSCSI access
NX3100 offer CIFS and NFS acon the NX3000.
cess, with optional iSCSI access on the NX3000. Both are in
the 2U rack-mount format, with 24 TB of internal capacity on the
NX3100 and 12 TB on the NX3000. The new PowerVault NX3600 and
NX3610 are 1 GbE and 10 GbE, respectively, with file and block access. The NX3600 scales to 576 TB while a dual NX3610 configuration can go to 1 PB.
Nexsan. Like EMC, Nexsan has also followed in the path created
by NetApp and launched its own unified storage line, in March 2012.
The NST-series devices support NAS and iSCSI and use SLC flash
and DRAM to accelerate performance in the companys FASTier
cache feature, introduced with the E5000 series in 2011. There are

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

three products in the NST-series family: the 5100, 5300 and 5500,
with maximum capacities of 93 TB, 720 TB and 1 PB, respectively.
Built-in SSD capacities are 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB, respectively.
Drive types range from 7,200 rpm SATA to 15,000 rpm SAS or SSD.
Customers can start with NAS or iSCSI access and upgrade to unified storage.

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

Overland. The SnapServer NAS range from Overland Storage

is set at a similar market level to the HP X1000. It is powered by
GuardianOS, developed by Adaptec, from which Overland acquired
the SnapServer line in 2008. The
SnapServer N2000 unit is stackOverlands
able up to six units with a maxiSnapServer N2000
mum capacity of 12 drive slots
unit is stackable up
per array. The system supports
either SAS or SATA drives and ofto six units with a
fers NFS and iSCSI connectivity
maximum capacity
options via dual 1 Gbps Ethernet
of 12 drive slots per
ports. Snapshotting is included
array.
via Microsoft Windows VSS. Replication services are an optional
extra via the Snap Enterprise Data Replicator add-on.
Although not offering the extended capabilities of scale-out
NAS, the SMB NAS products here still have an important role to
play in SME system environments. NAS systems have evolved from
being dedicated NFS/CIFS file serving solutions into products that
also offer block-level storage. This extended functionality is now
within the reach of SMEs and will allow them to address their data
consolidation needs whilst also offering a cost-effective storage
platform for virtual server environments.n
Martin Taylor is support team leader at Capita Financial Systems.

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Clustered NAS vs
traditional NAS solutions
Compared with traditional NAS, clustered
NAS offers file visibility across petabytes
of storage and is hugely scalable. Find out
more about its advantages. by Martin Glassborow

Future of NAS

its roots in the worlds of media and high-performance computing; these two areas have dealt with the problems
of operating massively scalable storage solutions for longer than
most.
Traditional NAS solutions still hark back to the earliest days of
Auspex Systems and NetApp, where a NAS solution at the very basic level was a server with some disk attached to it. You could add
more disk and a more powerful server, but scalability was limited
in terms of performance and capacity.
Traditional NAS solutions essentially comprise a single storage device; more than one of them may be configured in failover
cluster, but scalability is limited by the amount of CPU/memory
and disk that a single NAS device can make use of. In the case of
failover environments, best practice places an upper limit of 50%
of each servers individual capacity to provide the space required
for failover.
By contrast, clustered NAS allows horizontal scaling across a
lustered NAS has

Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
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Desktop
NAS

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

number of devices with all of them being active and able to see all
files in the cluster. This has a number of advantages:
If your storage servers become CPU/memory-bound, you can
add a device to gain processing power without adding disk.
If you run out of storage, you can add disk that all devices
can see, but you dont have to purchase additional devices.
A device failure is non-disruptive, and the load of the failed
unit can be spread across the whole cluster.

Scalability Benefits
Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
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Desktop
NAS

15

The special sauce in the leading clustered NAS products is a distributed file system. This enables all the nodes in a cluster to see
all the files in the environment; examples are OneFS from EMC-Isilon, General Parallel File System (GPFS) from IBM and Ibrix Fusion
from Hewlett-Packard.
This ability to scale performance and capacity requirements independently of each other is an important feature of most clustered NAS solutions. This allows more effective use of resources
compared with traditional NAS, as it is no longer necessary to purchase new NAS devices to add capacity or to purchase storage
when all that is required is more throughput at the storage server
level.
Clustered NAS can carry out all traditional NAS file serving requirements in a more scalable manner. For example, SONAS from
IBM starts at 27 TB and could be configured with just a couple of
nodes. This would compare very reasonably to a traditional NAS
solution.
But NAS clustering really comes into its own when you have a
rapidly growing NAS estate scaling to many terabytes of storage

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

with a rapid growth curve and the requirement to grow non-disruptively and with minimal migration effort.
In the past if growth required more NAS, you often needed to
migrate existing data to the new, larger-capacity device. With clustered NAS the addition of extra capacity and performance does not
require a data migration exercise since all storage servers can see
all the data.
Theres far less effort inWith clustered NAS,
volved in managing clustered
the addition of extra
NAS compared with multiple
capacity and
traditional NAS devices, and I
have found that with clustered
performance does
NAS we can manage in excess
not require a data
of 1 petabyte (PB) per full-time
migration exercise.
equivalent (FTE) employee.
Clustered NAS is beginning to make a big impact in large virtualised environments where
many thousands of server images along with their data can be
stored in a multi-node NAS cluster. EMCs acquisition of Isilon will
certainly drive the use of NAS clustering in VMware environments.

Clustered NAS Vendors

With EMCs acquisition of Isilon at the end of 2010, HPs acquisition of Ibrix in 2009 and NetApps acquisition of Spinnaker in 2003,
there are now a number of mature vendors in this space. And Symantec has even waded into the market. The following is a breakdown of these vendors products:
EMC. The core of Isilons product is the OneFS Operating System, which scales performance in a near-linear fashion as more
nodes are added, up to a maximum of 144, and can provide a capacity of more than 10 PB in a single file system.

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

An Isilon cluster can be made up of a number of nodes that provide for IOPS, sequential throughput or capacity, which allows for
a great deal of flexibility in configuration.
Isilon offers automated storage tiering using an automated
policy engine known as SmartPools, which also allows additional nodes to be added and data to be restriped across these nodes
non-disruptively.

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

IBM. IBM built its own clustered NAS solution based on its mature GPFS clustered file system and standard Lintel servers; these
have been combined to produce SONAS (Scale Out Network Attached Storage).
SONAS supports billions of files and more than 14 PB of storage
in a single file system with up to 30 interface nodes and 30 storage
pods able to be configured in a single SONAS cluster.
Different types of disk can be put into different pools with a policy engine used to determine file placement and file migration. The
policy engine can restripe data when new nodes are added. Tape
can also be fully integrated as an additional pool with Tivoli Storage Manager, providing transparent hierarchical storage management (HSM) capabilities.
HP. HP bundled the Ibrix software it acquired with its server
technology to build the X9000 Network Storage System. This comes
in a number of models, including gateways that allow customers to
provide their own disk but also fully integrated appliances that contain servers and storage. All models in the X9000 range can be combined into a single file system to provide up to 16 PB of file space.
The X9000 supports data tiering that can move data seamlessly and
without disruption onto appropriate tiers of storage.
NetApp. The results of NetApps Spinnaker acquisition were realised in the form of the Ontap 8 operating system. Ontap 8 pro-

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Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS

vides a traditional NAS environment but also can be configured

in cluster mode to provide a scale-out environment. This decision
must be made at the install of your NetApp appliance, and currently there is no way of migrating between these two modes. Ontap
8 cluster mode allows up to 24 (or 12 pairs) of NetApp filers to be
combined into a single cluster. Ontap 8 has probably the least in
common architecturally with any of its competitors. Cluster mode
only really allows each of the filers to serve one anothers file systems via a single service name; there is no single global file system.
So although the global namespace could cover the full capacity of all of the filers combinedwhich is currently in excess of 40
PBthe individual file systems are limited to 100 TB. This is a serious limitation in the NetApp implementation of clustered NAS as it
lacks the elegance of one large file system and will require more
work, including an increased data migration workload, to scale environments. n
Martin Glassborow is a storage manager with a major UK-based media company
and blogs under the name Storagebod.

Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Desktop NAS: What it is

and what its good for
Desktop NAS devices are particularly useful for
small offices and branches. In this interview,
discover the key characteristics of desktop NAS.
by Martin Taylor

Future of NAS

offer cheap and easily configurable storage capacity for small-office and branch-office use cases. Usually these
devices come with basic RAID data protection and the ability to
link to network directories to set security provision. But, what are
the limitations of desktop NAS, and how useful is it as a backup
target or for primary storage?
In this interview, SearchStorage.co.UK Bureau Chief Antony Adshead speaks with Martin Taylor, support team leader at Capita Financial Systems, about the key characteristics of desktop NAS and
the use cases it is best suited to.

esktop NAS devices

Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

What is desktop NAS and what features and levels of performance are available in this kind of hardware?
To start from the base level, were talking about a small disk array
thats capable of RAID striping, generally only two levels, which will
be RAID 10 or RAID 5 depending on the resilience that you want,
with a native operating system installed on the box that acts as a

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Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
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Desktop
NAS

20

broker between your clients and the file serving. Quite often, these
include things like Active Directory connectors so you can interrogate your AD for security information.
The first network-attached storage device I ever worked with
was a SnapServer that had something like a 200 file share limit on
it, so obviously things have come on a huge amount since then.
NAS is basically transparent to users these days. Theres very little
overhead for talking to your Windows network, and its a cheap and
easy way to store files that require file service access. Obviously,
if you buy something with iSCSI connectivity you can begin to host
applications and databases but for the purposes of this discussion
were talking about file serving.
If were talking about levels of performance in desktop NAS systems, they seem to be either four- or five-drive-capable with Level
10 or Level 5 RAID. This seems to be common for most of the entrylevel devices such as the [Buffalo] TeraStation.
Its very easy to configure these devices for users. There are
simply drop-down menus and you manage them via a Web interface. They tend to have a broker operating system on them that
talks to Windows. This can be Linux-based [although] there are flavours of operating system that come direct from Microsoft that
are attached to these devices. Again, the important thing [when
configuring these devices for users] is linking into your Active Directory if youve got that requirement.
If [youve got] a very small office or if you are a home user,
you can put this device on your network and point your files at
it and off you go; it doesnt require any security configuration.
But if [youre in] a small-office enterprise environment where you
need to define levels of security access to files, then its dead
easy because there is nothing native on the box and you can do
it all through Active Directory. You set file and folder permissions
through the interface on the desktop NAS device that are dragged
from your AD.

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Future of NAS
Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

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What can you use desktop NAS for, and what about its suitability for use for backup or primary storage?
In the small-enterprise environment that Im in, desktop NAS is
a very cheap and easy way of gaining some space for file archival or email archival purposes: stuff you need quick access to [if
youre at] a small remote site. Also, image storage is a big thing
with us with our large image
databases, and we find theyre
With the amount of
a very cheap way of storing
large amounts of images; they
disk space you get
are available to users all the
and the redundancy,
time. And theres redundancy
desktop NAS makes
in the devices so we dont have
sense economically.
to worry about failures, and we
get alerts if there is a problem.
So, basically, theyre great as a bin area for all files that you
dont want on levels of expensive storage. Its perfectly possible to
drop files down to them off of the SAN as well, when we find its no
longer economic to keep them there for access reasons, etc.
But mainly the use for us, at small satellite offices, theyre very
cheap file storage, even cheaper than Windows storage. When
you look at the price of storage on desktop NAS youre looking at
something comparable to a single server drive, so with the amount
of disk space you get and the redundancy, economically desktop
NAS definitely makes sense in the [small-enterprise] environment
but it must be used correctly. I certainly wouldnt consider it for
live, online storage of files that required a lot of access; that would
be more server-based.
The other use we find for desktop NAS in our environment is that
its a very cheap way of hosting backup files. Currently, were using [Symantec] Backup Exec to back up all our stuff and find that
desktop NAS is good as a backup to disk device. This is for non-critical backups, incremental, etc.

Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options

Obviously, we hive off our full backups off to tape but [the desktop NAS is] great as a transition area, as compared with the cost
of storage such as tape the price is very favourable and because
its online all the time, the restore times are quick. Because there
arent any problems getting people to deal with tape loading [at]
remote sites, etc, then its available instantaneously if we have
to restore something for users. So as a backup staging area I definitely think they have a good use, and thats the main purpose we
use them for other than file storage. n

Future of NAS

TechTarget Storage Media Group

Scale-out
NAS
Traditional
NAS
Scale-out vs
Traditional
Desktop
NAS

SearchStorage.co.UK

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Sue Troy

Editorial Director
Rich Castagna

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Francesca Sales

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Antony Adshead

Creative Director
Linda Koury

Publisher, Storage Media Group

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Storage Essential Guide: Your NAS options