Auspex Systems, Inc. (ASPX)has released a white paper addressing the latest approaches available to help enterprises control the hardware and administrative costs associated with data storage. The 19-page document, called “NAS-SAN Convergence Today: New Trends in Enterprise Storage”, can be downloaded free of charge from the Auspex Website.
The paper discusses the current enterprise storage landscape, the factors driving the ongoing increase in storage demand, and the strengths and weaknesses of existing storage topologies including Storage Area Networks (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). It then describes a new category of storage appliance, called a Network Storage Controller, that can bridge the gap between the block-level access provided in SAN environments and the file-level access provided by NAS network servers.
The paper addresses the ability of a Network Storage Controller to provide cost-effective file services and file sharing to a SAN by enabling NAS protocols to operate within the existing SAN infrastructure. It demonstrates the ability of this new strategy to:
–Eliminate the need for complicated emulation software and additional servers to provide file-level access in SAN environments
–Enable effective data sharing across an organization without maintaining multiple mirrored and backup copies of files
–Reduce hardware and data management costs by eliminating the need to purchase and administer a separate SAN island
–Add value to data through new capabilities such as storage awareness, demand awareness and content awareness
–Utilize storage virtualization to simplify the management of complex heterogeneous storage configurations
Other topics covered include the increasing acceptance of networked storage, the reasons that most enterprises lack an effective data sharing system, the difference between sharing data and sharing storage, and the call by storage analysts for new solutions leveraging the best features of all existing storage architectures.”NAS-SAN Convergence Today: New Trends in Enterprise Storage,” can be downloaded at www.auspex.com/whitepaper.html