A Network Attached Storage (NAS) box is a file-level data storage server connected to a network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. It is classed as an appliance or purpose-built specialized computing device containing one or more storage drives, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAID.
It differs from the traditional file serving and Direct Attached Storage (DAS) in that the operating system and other software on the box provide only the functionality of data storage, data access and the management. It uses file-based protocols such as NFS (popular on UNIX systems) or SMB (Server Message Block) (used with MS Windows systems).
NetApp is one of the early proponents of NAS with the shipment of its first NAS box to Patrick Mulrooney at Tandem Computers in 1993. During a visit to Singapore, NetApp CTO, Jay Kidd reported that Asia Pacific (which includes countries like China, South Korea and India) contributed to about 13-14% of NetApp’s total revenue of US$4.58 billion for the nine months ended Jan 23, 2015.
The latest DataStorageAsean Nattering about NAS looks into the opportunities and challenges of NAS vendors in the ASEAN market. We are honoured to have interviewed Chin-Fah Heoh, Country Manager, NetApp Malaysia & Brunei, and discuss with him NetApp’s business strategy in the region in light of the continued growth of cloud solution across ASEAN.
DataStorageAsean: With cloud-based storage solutions such as file-sync-share as well as object-based storage growing in popularity, is NAS still relevant?
Chin-Fah Heoh: NAS is still very relevant for the workloads that require low latency, security and the familiarity of the access interface from the application and users. For example, the Common Internet File System / The Server Message Block (CIFS/SMB) from the Microsoft Windows platform and the Network File System (NFS) from the Unix platform. With the increase of unstructured data from all kinds of sources, object storage is gaining popularity in the enterprise data center - most of them still require a NAS gateway to ease the adoption of object storage in their infrastructure.
Cloud based storage is good for an enterprise to either burst their resources during a short period of time or for archiving data for a very long period of time without the need of frequent access. Usually data that is stored in the cloud gets locked into a specific cloud provider unless a common format of data is used to store the data across on-premise storage and the cloud storage.
With the continuous development and enhancement of the SMB and NFS protocol, NAS is getting more important in the datacenter. We are seeing more and more of the migration of the workload over from block storage to NAS, especially after the wide adoption of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
DataStorageAsean: What’s the difference between SMB and Enterprise NAS?
Chin-Fah Heoh: Enterprise NAS mainly serves mission critical data, such as a core banking database, a thousand Virtual Machines (VM) in a virtualized environment, or massive NFS storage for a seismic processing grid computing environment.
With the workload mentioned above, the NAS has to be able to provide reliability, availability and security to the customer. Performance is critical for some of the workload - most enterprise NAS vendors offer all flash storage in their product line, including NetApp’s All Flash Array systems tailored to support seamless data movement in the enterprise across different tiers of storage, from flash to disk to cloud.
Data protection is very important, and the tight integration between the NAS and the application is of upmost critical to ensure that data is securely protected and easily restored, if required. In other environments that require zero data loss infrastructure, the Enterprise NAS vendor is prompted to offer a metro cluster solution that can promise zero recovery point objective (RPO) in a site disaster scenario.
SMB NAS usually serves departmental file sharing or a small server virtualization environment; the service level expectation may not be the same as the Enterprise NAS in terms of performance, reliability and security. The protocol support should be the same, but it may not support the full suite of the standard defined.
DataStorageAsean: What use cases are companies using NAS for?
Chin-Fah Heoh: Traditionally, NAS was used mainly for file sharing, home folders and also collaboration within an enterprise. Some enterprises use NAS as a simple storage for hundreds of devices to store their data, for example, in a semiconductor manufacturing environment, hundreds of final test machines which will send all test results over to the NAS for storage and analytics purposes.
High Performance Computing (HPC) is another increasing popular scenario for NAS, for the same reason that it is easy to implement, provides good performance and is highly scalable. With the introduction of NFSv4 and later versions, the feature of parallel NFS was introduced whereby it allows parallel access by the NAS client, hence, increases performance and scalability of the NAS architecture which previously could not be done easily.
Databases are even running over the NAS protocol, either on a SMBv3 or NFSv4. This makes the infrastructure much easier to set up, configure, administer, and troubleshoot.
DataStorageAsean: What are the key functions companies should look for in a NAS product?
Chin-Fah Heoh: When evaluating a NAS product, one of the main criteria to look at is the protocol that it supports, and whether it adheres to the standard that is defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), especially for any NFS protocol.
When looking at storage, it should have the capability to allow the administrator to easily service, upgrade and move data between different tiers of storage without affecting the users.
Performance is also definitely an important criteria, with the popularity of SSDs in the market, the NAS product should have a proven track record in handling this new media as not all implementation of NAS can take full advantage of the benefits provided by SSD.
Lastly, both data protection and storage efficiency are the most important criteria. The product needs to able to protect the data in any kind of scenario as well as able to provide fast data restoration, whereas storage efficiency will allow the organization to reduce the cost of storage while able to store more data.
DataStorageAsean: What is unique about your NAS offering?
Chin-Fah Heoh: NetApp is a pioneer in the NAS market; having created the NFS protocol and NAS product more than 20 years ago. Today NetApp continue to innovate storage capabilities as well as contribute to the development of the NFS standard in IETF.
NetApp is also closely working with Microsoft to incorporate their new features into our support of CIFS/SMB protocol.
All of NetApp’s NAS storage supports both the NFS and CIFS/SMB at the same time and is able to share a single volume with both the NFS and CIFS clients. This allows for a wider collaboration within an organization without the need of multiple workstations for each user.
Since the introduction of Clustered Data ONTAP, a NetApp solution that gives customers reliable scale-out capabilities without reconfiguration, NetApp has introduced a feature called Infinite Volume which is able to provide up to 20PB as well as scalability across multiple nodes with a single name space. Infinite volume is accessible via the NFSv3, NFSv4, pNFS (parallel NFS), and SMB protocols.
NetApp’s proven storage efficiency includes compression, deduplication, cloning, thin provisioning, Flash caching, and many more solutions that will help customers to simplify data management and help them keep pace with growth whilst optimizing costs. NetApp’s NAS solutions give customers non-disruptive operations, proven efficiency, and seamless scalability within a unified architecture.
Our solutions make it easy for customers to deploy and integrate with their existing environments. This builds on NetApp’s vision for the future of data management – Data Fabric – to help customers manage and control their data across different environments.
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