NAS Virtualization Solution Evaluation Criteria

by Abhinav Joshi

Background

Businesses today continue to face the challenges associated with storing and managing mission- critical information, much of which is in the form of globally distributed, unstructured file-level data. With ever-increasing data creation and long-term retention requirements, businesses are moving toward storage consolidation that entails moving file-level data from discrete file servers to scalable, highly available NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices that can hold terabytes of data. As the storage and the associated discrete feature set requirement grows, managing the increasing number of heterogeneous NAS devices poses new challenges associated with management, scalability, cost, and utilization.


Introduction to NAS Virtualization

NAS virtualization provides the capability to effectively manage the heterogeneous NAS and file server environment by providing a layer of abstraction between the NAS devices, file servers, and the clients that access them. It provides a single logical view of the heterogeneous NAS environment spread across different file systems on different NAS devices by encapsulating the file systems and presenting a single logical file mount point. The backend NAS mount points associated with this logical mount point can be hosted across different tiers of storage. It also overcomes the limitations with the traditional NAS architecture and allows implementation of Global Namespace across NAS devices spreading across different data centers. It also allows creation of application-specific storage pools, and enables management of all these implementations from a single management console easily and efficiently. In addition, the very important features provided by NAS virtualization are:

o Data migration capabilities
o Storage tiering and data lifecycle management
o Dynamic capacity load balancing
o Remote replication/disaster recovery
o Reporting and forecasting


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