NAS Revisited

We are seeing a well documented shift in industry thinking towards the efficient and effective use of memory in performance-driven storage configurations, particularly in network attached storage.

This is breathing new life into the NAS market with a welcome sigh of relief from businesses that are running in to performance bottlenecks.

There is a recent piece on SearchStorage.com titled Performance Caching: Your new Tier 0. In it, Brad O'Neill from Taneja Group outlines huge positive implications for the NAS market.

And just a few days ago, ByteandSwitch.com featured an in-depth story on The Outer Limits of NAS.

The world has accepted server consolidation via NAS, hands down. What isn't clear is how far the consolidation envelope can be pushed before performance suffers.

"There is a growing market for environments that need to address or avoid I/O bottlenecks as a result of overconsolidation of storage capacity, including consolidating multiple smaller NAS filers or servers," maintains Greg Schulz of the StorageIO consultancy.

These recent pieces point to an overwhelming recognition of the server-to-storage performance gap, and the acute needs requiring immediate attention in large NAS deployments.

And, as we have noted before, this isn't the first time we've seen insightful folks suggest high performance memory is the solution.