NAS and SAN are Interoperable

The growing demand for information access coupled with the recognition that information is a
primary asset for most businesses is driving the development of new methods for accessing,
managing, and delivering information. Businesses today are looking to leverage their existing
infrastructures while increasing their return on investment by utilizing technology that is best
suited to the applications, network architectures, and server systems deployed.

Storage networking provides the answer to today's storage requirements. Storage networking
technology addresses the growth in data and information providing an architectural framework
around which companies can deploy storage in the manner best suited to their needs. Both
Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies enable
companies to realize the benefits of networked access to storage. The convergence of NAS and
SAN will enable customers to deploy best of breed network storage solutions optimized to meet
their unique challenges. We IT professionals may have at one time viewed SAN and NAS as
competing technologies, however today they are viewed as completely complementary and
invaluable to each other. This is rightly so.

Among the key reasons designers looking to integrate SAN and NAS solutions are the following:

Scalability
Fibre channel SANs provide a scalable, high-performance network storage architecture.
Switches, directors and fibre-ready storage arrays allow both high-performance (200Mb/sec) and
greater server extensibility than is possible with SCSI. NAS can be readily scaled, though, by
adding capacity up to multiple terabytes or by adding multiple NAS appliances on the network.
Since NAS architectures can rely on existing TCP/IP networks, long distance storage extension is
possible. A converged SAN/NAS solution makes use of fibre channel abilities, allowing customers
to adapt storage resources to drive applications to greater levels of scalability, distance and
performance.

Storage Management
SAN architecture interconnects storage systems, backup devices and servers, and removes LAN
traffic to improve network performance. The option to manage storage resources separate from
the host servers now enables a new level of storage resource management. Specific attention
can be provided to the enterprise data and storage, independent of the host server that "owns"
the data. Replication, backups, restores, trend data and security management can be centrally
controlled and administered. By linking pools of storage with networking technologies, companies
can access data whenever they want it, with perfect data integrity.

Availability
SAN's high availability comes from its disaster recovery, live backup capabilities, and fail-over
support from redundant data paths and storage systems. NAS offers fast file access time and
availability by using mature network topologies, appliances and data replication (at the storage
system level) to protect and secure file-level storage. A converged SAN/NAS solution enhances
data availability by enabling a balance of block and file I/O for maximum efficiency. Offering fibre
channel SAN and NAS, the storage role can offer host servers multiple levels of storage
connection, performance, cost, and availability, all from a single network infrastructure.

Server Consolidation
In a SAN solution, servers are attached to a data network, increasing connectivity to a common
enterprise storage array. Economies of scale are achieved with aggregated, higher disk
utilization. A NAS consists of a file system residing on the NAS appliance, connecting to an
existing or new Ethernet network, again using enterprise storage. Since server growth and
storage growth are separated, open servers can be sized and managed based on processing
time, not storage restraints. A converged SAN/NAS increases storage utilization to 75 percent or
more for UNIX and Windows servers.

NAS and SAN are Complementary

A number of other trends in information technology have driven the adoption of storage
networking; including:
• A diverse range of users and applications requiring access to common data
• The growing use of appliances dedicated to a single function providing performance,
reliability, and lower cost of ownership
• The de-facto use of network standards including TCP/IP, NFS, and CIFS
• A desire to deploy solutions with features that provide a competitive business advantage
on an application by application basis
• The need to reduce management costs and complexity
• An ability to scale infrastructures easily without adding staff
• The ability to reposition existing resources within the infrastructure, taking advantage of
cost savings in both hardware and existing expertise

Why Convergence?
NAS and SAN technologies each bring unique benefits to the storage customer. Storage
networking enables companies to access and deliver their information assets anywhere, anytime,
and in the most optimal and available fashion. The networking of storage evolved to address the
need to provide more open connectivity to data and information, and break the bottlenecks that
developed in traditional storage architectures. The high costs of managing storage in a distributed
fashion led to the consolidation of storage resources and the subsequent need to share access to
these consolidated systems.

By consolidating storage in one location, one can benefit from efficiencies of management,
utilization, and reliability. SANs have become a popular method of providing storage consolidation
due to some of the features Fibre Channel presents in terms of the number of storage nodes,
ease of connectivity, and separation distance from the host servers that SANs provide. Many of
these same benefits are realized with NAS systems; however one of the key differences between
NAS and SAN is the access method.

SAN systems present block interfaces while NAS systems present file interfaces. This means
NAS systems are typically more efficient when serving files while database engines and large
block I/O operations typically utilize block interfaces. With consolidated storage there is often an
increased need for high bandwidth low latency connections to service the large amounts of
information from one location. An often overlooked requirement brought about by consolidation is
the common need to access the consolidated storage from many different server or client
systems, while sustaining access speeds to larger amounts of storage.

NAS head-end systems provide simple open protocol file access to storage. This approach can
provide performance advantages and faster data response times due to file level caching in the
NAS system. Many legacy server systems are I/O bottlenecked. Adding a FC HBA on a shared
PCI bus to connect to SAN storage may not reduce the I/O bottleneck, or may only provide only
limited I/O gains.

By decoupling storage from the servers, a scalable, tiered architecture can be deployed that
meets the changing and increasing data access demands. Just as network switches were
required to evolve beyond the limitations of a shared bus to switched fabric architectures, today's
information architectures require the openness and scalability provided by network attaching
storage. Combining NAS and SAN features provides system architects the ability to balance data
I/O for maximum efficiency.
NAS appliances can be connected into an FC fabric to present the pooled storage in a consistent
manner. File types and multiple classes of service can be achieved with NAS and FC. NAS
appliances or servers can be attached to FC switches and directors and get their storage
volumes just like any other server in the FC network. NAS appliances can be directly connected
to the storage arrays, and common disk-centric management and backup routines can be applied
to all storage. Servers can also have a dual-access method; FC for some volumes and NFS-
mounted (or CIFS) drives for other data. Classes of service can be defined to meet certain
performance, availability and cost goals, thus using the strengths of SAN and NAS to deliver the
desired solution.

Converged SAN and NAS Solution

Enabling the merging of SAN and NAS storage through our NAS head end offering provides
simple multi-protocol file access to back-end SAN storage disks dedicated to specific NAS
applications. This architecture can deliver performance advantages and higher data availability by
relying on the advanced hardware and software functionality of enterprise storage systems.

The convergence of SAN and NAS architectures will also permit to continue deploying best-of-
breed solutions that are optimized to meet their unique business and application challenges. This
movement to converged network storage makes possible:
• Storage centric data protection and administration
• Storage consolidation
• Heterogeneous information sharing from a single data image
• Ability to provide multiple levels of service to meet service level agreements and cost
goals
• Increased storage utilization for heterogeneous environments
• Dispersed costs for storage acquisition (UNIX and Windows NT servers can take
advantage of technology that was once financially prohibitive)
• Centralized/reduced management

In summary, the decision to deploy a NAS system, SAN architecture, or consolidated network
storage solution should be based on a careful analysis of requirements and design goals. Each
solution contributes features that can address different aspects of information access needs.