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Today's data storage challenges
Explosive growth in e-commerce, data warehousing and supply chain management applications has resulted in an exponential growth in data storage requirements. These applications have become critical to business success, with employees and customers demanding uninterrupted access to corporate systems and data.
Regulatory mandates in the banking, financial, and insurance industries are also driving the need for high levels of system and data backup with stringent disaster recovery requirements.
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The solution: Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Increasing storage management and administration costs has resulted in significant interest in moving from a direct-attached storage model to a more scalable and manageable networked storage model.
Storage Area Networking (SAN) technology has emerged to provide real-time transaction and database access including data mirroring, backup, and restoration. In addition to SAN technology, Cisco Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology provides fast, simple, and reliable access to information in an IP networking environment.
In simple terms, storage devices in a NAS setup have network addresses instead of physical connections to servers, so network devices can access the networks directly without going through a particular server machine.
By delivering high performance, intelligent, and highly available TCP/IP networks for Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) environments through Gigabit Ethernet-enabled Catalyst switches, Cisco IOS routers, and various other leading networking products, Cisco Storage Networking addresses the requirements for file-based storage networks.
The figure below shows a NAS deployment using a Gigabit Ethernet network.
Network Attached Storage Application
The Cisco ONS 15540 provides Ethernet transport for NAS applications. Applications, systems, or organizations can be assigned their own channels or wavelengths. This allows bandwidth to be allocated and prioritized across wavelengths to ensure Quality of Service (QoS) for critical applications such as backup and recovery.
In addition, since NAS uses well-understood technologies such as IP, Ethernet, Network File System (NFS), and Common Internet File System (CIFS), it can be considerably less complex to deploy and operate.
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Benefits of NAS
NAS has led the way for the mainstream deployment of IP-based storage consolidation and file sharing. NAS has become popular in a large number of environments including collaborative development, engineering, e-mail, Web, and general file serving. In particular, because NAS abstracts storage to the file-system level, it can manage the sharing of unique data very effectively between multiple users and applications.
NAS technology optimizes file sharing across the IT infrastructure by providing fast, simple, and reliable access to information in an IP networking environment. Storage and computing devices can be attached over a network, so they are no longer stranded behind a single computer. This allows for greater flexibility in assigning storage to systems by enabling multiple systems to access several different storage devices regardless of location.
Here are several other benefits of the Cisco NAS:
- Allows for the consolidation of data, which reduces administrative overhead and simplifies data backup and recovery.
- Provides a lower cost of ownership because it’s a scalable, high-performance storage networking solution that is easy to deploy and operate.
- Makes efficient use of storage resources such as Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) storage and tape library systems. Without an effective storage network strategy, disk use has been estimated to be as low as 40 to 50 percent.
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Compatibility with Wide Area File Services (WAFS)
Cisco Wide Area File Services (WAFS) is an emerging technology solution designed to achieve Local Area Network (LAN)-like performance even when accessing files located at very remote branch offices.
Cisco NAS compliments WAFS by enhancing the rate of return of the WAFS. By combining Cisco WAFS and NAS technology, customers will have an integrated solution to consolidate branch office data into the data center, allowing company-wide data to be centrally stored, managed, protected and accessed.
With this integrated solution from Cisco, IT administrators will be able to take advantage of centralized resources for backup and disaster recovery to achieve better protection of their branch-office data. In addition, centralized management will also help to simplify and reduce the cost of data administration for remote offices throughout the enterprise.
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| NAS resources
Here are some resources that can help you understand the benefits and product features of Cisco NAS.
Product collateral
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(PDF, 128KB)