The Challenge of Scalable, Manageable NAS

As the capacity of NAS or UNIX NFS servers is exceeded for a particular applications, customers have traditionally been forced to choose between either upgrading to larger file servers or NAS appliances or adding more of them, perhaps replicating the same data among them. These choices have serious drawbacks:

• Larger servers/NAS appliances are more expensive per increment of serving capacity, and in some cases still remain bottlenecks on overall performance.
• More servers create additional points of server and storage management.
• Fragmentation of workloads across more servers and storage decreases capacity utilization.
• Replicated data wastes storage capacity on copies of data and generates new data management challenges associated with keeping data copies consistent.
• High availability becomes increasingly expensive, requiring duplication of large amounts of expensive hardware.