Untitled Document

	Professional I.T. Services
about nimble • services • case studies • Cost Effective IT • careers • investors • home

CostEffective IT: Network Storage

Cost-Effective IT: Network Storage, by Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show "Advisor" Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, Inc., provides weekly information on our show about business technology issues. He can be reached at 281-445-4800 x250 or rsonnier@nimbleservices.com.

This week I will discuss Network Storage.

What is storage?

In IT, storage is maintaining information on some type of recording media so that you can recall it for later use. The disk drive in your PC is the most familiar storage device; but there are many type of storage devices. The most common types are:

Magnetic disk
Optical disk
Magnetic tape

For each type, there is bewildering array of actual products with different form factors and capacities from DVD+R to 3.5 inch floppy. Every storage device must be connected to a computer to use and there are many types of connections from ATA to USB. The performance of the storage depends on the device itself, the device's connection to the host computer and the power of the host computer. Storage performance is critical to IT performance. In most cases when IT applications are not meeting the performance needs of the business, storage performance is large factor.

Network Storage

By adding a network interface into the computer connected to the storage device as described above, other systems can access the storage over the network using a variety of methods. Web browsing is one such method. Your browser reaches over the network to a server with HTML files on it and
that server sends you a copy of the page you request. Similarly, your PC can receive a file from the network server in your office. It uses a different protocol than the browser, but the process is the same.

Today, the IT vendors offer dedicated network storage called Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN). There is a great deal of marketing and hype around these products as if they are really something new and different. They are not! NAS is just a computer with attached storage devices with a network interface. Functionally, there is no different between a NAS device and your networked server. Most NAS devices run the same operating systems on the same hardware as a standard server. SAN is just another storage connection technology like USB. SAN has many advanced features especially for high availability of your storage.

If you need network storage, you should compare a standard file server to any NAS offering. Some NAS products are a better value but they rarely outperform a standard server. SAN is oversold and it not cost justified for most applications.

Recommendations

For network storage, you must fight through the hype and work the numbers. Compare a standard server solution to any NAS or other new product by calculating your cost per Gigabyte of usable storage and compare the performance of the solutions. If possible, benchmark the performance with your applications. Vendor provided performance measurements are like the MPG numbers on new cars. Your mileage or network storage performance may vary.

Next week, I will discuss the high speed wireless networking.

Home • Services • Case Studies • Whitepapers • Forum