10 September 2010
Friday
Reshaping NAS for midrange efficiency
By Sunil Chavan | Mar 31, 2010
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PrintData is big business in today’s market. With the right information, businesses can gain new market share, cement their current foundations, widen their reach and take advantage of new market opportunities quickly.
In short, the efficiency of information storage infrastructure directly affects business competitiveness. Now, with the increasing scrutiny by regulators, rising cost of non-compliance and exploding growth of data, having a data infrastructure that is both scalable and intelligent is vital.
Managing unstructured data is now a key CXO concern. While most data infrastructures were structured data in mind, the proliferation of video, emails, pictures and business-related graphics as business assets has meant that managing them properly is a major business concern.
Consider a healthcare firm. It relies heavily on the proper storage of sensitive and important data as pictures, diagrams, X-ray photos etc. Storing these electronically not only saves on material costs, but also improves security, and privacy, while reducing misplacement and physical damage. However, storing them properly and efficiently electronically can be a major challenge. As these are unstructured data, all the data need to be stored together unlike a relational database. For a storage infrastructure not designed for unstructured data, this will lead to large swaps of space being underutilized, leading to a very low return on assets (RoA).
Relooking at NAS
So how to tackle these problems? The traditional answer has been deploying a Network Attached Storage (NAS).
NAS provides a file-sharing network across many locations, unlike a Storage Area Network (SAN) that provides a block-level storage network that is more centralized. For many midsized organizations, NAS provides a more intuitive way to manage files across several offices or computers without rebuilding their entire storage infrastructure.
Despite its numerous advantages, NAS has traditionally posed four main problems. First is the complexity that is associated with managing storage across many locations and computers. Scalability and performance are others concerns, while the inability to manage unstructured data is becoming a liability. All these have led to an increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO)—a business concern especially after the recent financial downturn.
Space and speeds are two concerns that are now mandatory for a good NAS solution. In today’s business world where data growth continues unabated and where tolerance for data access is almost minimal, having a solution that constantly pushes the envelope in performance, scalability, consolidation and management for midrange storage is vital.
