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work-attached storage
Low-end or desktop NAS: The low end of the market is aimed at small
businesses and home users who require local shared storage. Increasingly,
this market is shifting toward a cloud NAS model.
Ty
pes of NAS
NA
S approaches: Pros and cons
Evolution of NAS
Over time, the baseline functionality of NAS devices has broadened to
support virtualization. High-end NAS products may also support data
deduplication, flash storage, multiprotocol access and replication.
To combat NAS sprawl, vendors are offering clustered NAS systems. A
clustered NAS system is a distributed file system that runs concurrently on
multiple NAS nodes. Clustering provides access to all files from any of the
clustered nodes regardless of the physical location of the file.
Some NAS devices run a standard operating system (OS) such as Microsoft
Windows, while others may run the vendor's proprietary operating system.
Although the Internet Protocol (IP) is the most common data
transport protocol, some mid-market NAS products may support the Network
File System (NFS), Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX), NetBIOS Extended
User Interface (NetBEUI) or Common Internet File System (CIFS)
protocols. High-end NAS products may support Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) for
even faster data transfer across the network.
SAN/NAS convergence
Until recently, technological barriers have kept the file and block storage
worlds separate, each in its own management domain and each with its own
strengths and weaknesses. Many storage managers view block storage as
first class and file storage as economy class. Given the prevalence of
business-critical databases housed on storage area networks (SANs), that's
understandable.