It's the 'iceberg analogy.' Transactional data may be above
water and get your attention, but the tremendous amount of
unstructured data makes up that vast majority of the iceberg that
rests underwater -- it's not visible because it's not used very
often. Moving unused data off of theSan [storage area
network]ontoNas [network attached
storage]systems makes a lot of sense
from a storage cost and performance standpoint.Clustering is another trend in Nas. We're seeing companies enjoy
great success with 'N-way' clustered Nas architectures in which
users can just scale systems as they need to. Scaling is
accomplished simply by adding more processing power and more
memory, resulting in a single effective storage system to the end
user.
We need to think about limitless file systems. There are now 16
TByte file systems, and that's a lot. But now that single files are
50 TBytes or 100 TBytes, you need Nas file systems that can handle
those enormous files. We're seeing file systems that can support
petabytes and beyond.
And there are other emerging issues. We've seen
data deduplication technology in backup environments, but now
we're seeing it in primary environments, particularly in Nas.
Compression certainly isn't a new technology, but applying
compression to the primary and secondary storage is something
you'll see much more of. Indexing and search are growing in
importance. You'll also see the consolidation of file- and
block-storage services, eventually making file and block services
more cooperative with one another.
Check out the entire
Nas FAQ guide.