Network Attached Storage: I NAS. Do You?
In 2013, INFINIDAT began shipping its first InfiniBox that was developed from the ground up as a truly unified storage solution, ready to offer multiple storage protocols for SAN, NAS and Object customers in the open systems market. The first versions of the product were delivered as a SAN (block) solution. With InfiniBox 2.2, we launched our NAS (file) platform. We did this while maintaining our core focus areas: high reliability, performance and scale, all at a disruptive price point.
So what does it really mean when it comes to our NAS story? Let’s start with NAS in general. NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a “file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients.”1
As we stated, InfiniBox is a truly unified storage, which allows us to avoid duplication of various components at the block and file levels. As a result, we offer a highly optimized solution to our customers that includes simple, unified management. Today, we provide both block and file access, and are working on additional protocols for implementation in upcoming releases.
As the INFINIDAT moto states — “Enterprise-proven without compromise.” This is exactly what we were targeting to while building our NAS solution. As part of an integrated system, our NAS leverages all existing capabilities of the InfiniBox array including; snapshots with no impact on performance, new data protection (RAID-like) capabilities, 99.99999% of availability, and more. With our first NAS offering, we focused on scalability across all vectors:
File system size? As large as the underlying storage supports:
Number of exported file systems? As many as you want:
Amount of files per file system? Billions without any major performance impact
File size? 1 Petabyte and above:
We made many interesting architectural decisions to enable an extremely scalable and reliable NAS solution. In a future post I will shed light on some of them.
In addition, I’d love to make this more of a dialogue. What kind of challenges do you see with your NAS systems? What would you expect from the ultimate NAS solution?
Please share your feedback and questions at the end of this post. I would also highly appreciate more details about your current NFS/NAS experience — please complete our short NFS questionnaire to share your thoughts.