NAS storage – The best solution yet for data centers?

 

Networking and explosion of data has driven data centers to invest in expensive storage solutions. However, as businesses minimize costs, we are increasingly seeing many SMBs shifting towards scalable enterprise NAS storage. However, NAS storage has been perceived as a storage technology not suitable for all enterprise environments. At first glance, that appears to be quite a narrow perception; nonetheless, the facts are quite the opposite of what you might expect. You might be surprised that it is one of the best solutions yet to minimize costs and still get the desired performance and scalability.

Why most SMBs are shifting to NAS

The main benefit of NAS systems is that they make it easy to centralize your data into one location. NAS storage is highly suitable for data centralization and makes it really easy for storage administrators to troubleshoot without incurring any downtime at all.

Network Attached Storage also benefits from being highly scalable, meaning that it's easy to add more space and performance just by simply adding additional drives or additional nodes. The best NAS systems are also much easier to manage than a traditional SAN solution, with most vendors providing everything you need in one bundle. For example, StoneFly provides many enterprise-grade features in their SSO NAS appliances like (WORM) volumes, Automated storage tiering, Deduplication, AES 256-bit encryption, and Sync/async multi-appliance/multi-site replication.

Another thing Network Attached Storage systems are known for RAID. "RAID" stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks". Any good NAS system will have some redundancy built-in, which means that if one drive fails, the data is still safe and accessible at all times. There are different levels of RAID that can be used to protect your data, but we will leave them for another day.

Some issues inherent to NAS storage

With that being said, NAS storage is not perfect. Since NAS is connected to a network, it often becomes the victim of ransomware which causes immense monetary and data loss to companies. Thankfully, reputed manufacturers like StoneFly provide Anti-virus and anti-ransomware support built into their appliances, as well as support for data replication and snapshots to make sure that your data stays secure.

What's more, because NAS uses standard Ethernet, it can suffer from poorer performance over long distances and can be subject to latency issues when multiple users are accessing the same data at once. However, NAS has come a long way in addressing these issues, and many of them now claim fast throughput speeds of up to 120 MB/s read and write and latency times as low as 2ms. With flexible and scalable storage, you can also upgrade your Ethernet to Gigabit to attain maximum transfer speeds and have an aggregated performance of all your nodes combined together.

Takeaway

No matter your IT needs, NAS storage is a viable technology for your data center. From SMBs to large enterprises, its affordability and flexibility make NAS storage a good NAS solution for every business. If this helped you, we suggest re thinking your data center storage. Who knows—maybe you'll too get rid of that overpriced array down the street!