NAS is winning - The Secret Sauce
Picture courtesy of Information Management magazine
I was with a customer a couple of days ago and we started talking about SAN and NAS again. And what was going on in my mind were on the nostalgic side but suddenly, it dawned to me that the facade of the decade old "war" is actually changing.
I know what I am going to say next will hit the NAS critics on the forehead and incur the wrath of the SAN bigots out there.
"NAS is winning"
When I first started on storage, my first Fibre Channel baby was the old Sun SS1000. Running at one quarter of 1Gbits/sec speed, it was ahead of its time. Then it went on to the Sun Photon A5000 and A7000 (which came from Sun's Encore acquisition). I was a SAN guy.
A friend of mine from East Malaysia called on me and told me about how great NAS was and I was a bit skeptical. I argued with him and we spoke about the limitations of FastEthernet on NAS. But 1 year after that, I joined the greatest (and still is, in my opinion) NAS company, Network Appliance. It was pure NAS with the tagline - "Fast, Simple, Reliable". I was in the middle of the SAN-NAS wars.
NetApp was all about NAS and became the "bashing boy" of the storage industry. EMC sales folks used to tell my customers that NetApp is a toy and during the early and mid 2000s, EMC was king. HDS was about SAN too, and so were many others. The SAN switches like Vixel, Gadzooks and Ancor were the up and coming stars.
How things have changed. The world now still pretty much runs on SAN. Big corporations still runs on FC-SAN, but in the past 2 to 3 years, iSCSI has also proliferated as the poor man's SAN. iSCSI rides on TCP/IP, and that is NAS's domain. At the same time, Gigabit networks dominates the LAN landscape, with 10 Gigabit sprouting here and there. NAS is riding on this multi-gigabit speed.
But what is really changing the reality of the SAN-NAS wars is the way we access information. Yahoo, Google made email available on the web. Applications that used to belong to your laptop or desktop, now can be accessed thru the web. Facebook changes the way we connect to people; IP TV changing the way we enjoy our entertainment; Google Apps has rendered MIS applications weak on the knees; and so on. These were the precursor to Cloud Computing.
And Cloud is changing the storage game plan for service providers offering "as-a-Service" cloud. FC-SAN or iSCSI SAN will probably be part of the service providers network, but given the fact that Cloud is about economies of scale. The more customers a Cloud provider gets, the more profit it can make. Unfortunately, expensive SAN gear is the big pendulum weighing down on the profit margin of the company. So, it is obvious that these companies will start investing in JBODs because they are significantly cheaper than Fibre Channel SAN.
At the same time, enterprise NAS ain't cheap either. But NAS has the capability to scale out horizontally, where as SAN might have to rely on some clustered file systems such as Polyserve (now belongs to HP), IBM's GPFS, or even Quantum (previously ADIC (previously SGI)) StorNext.
Scale-out NAS breaks away from the traditional NAS mindset, where there is limited scalability on the NAS controllers (2-8) and its underlying storage. Cloud applications means
And the secret sauce of scale-out NAS?
The File System
. Isilon was one of the earlier pioneers of scale-out NAS commercially. Its OneFS is the glue that enables global namespace, distributed file blocks across all nodes and so on. However, Isilon still require the customer to buy Isilon's hardware. You can't run away if they lock you in, and you have to pay for expensive hard disks (which you could get for 1/3 the price off the shelf).If we could break away from specialized storage hardware, that would give our customer's a choice. And we are reviewing that technology now. More about that the next time.
But I mentioned that the secret sauce is the file system and NAS is about file systems. I sincerely believe that file system is the future for Cloud and NAS will be the dominant storage.
Secret sauce, anyone?
