In the little over a year that we have been shipping our FXT Scale-out NAS Appliance, we have received very positive feedback on our product and its ability to scale NAS performance. Performance scaling is the result of both our Tiered File System (TFS), which dynamically allocates frequently used blocks to faster storage media, and our clustering technology which clusters up to 25 appliances together to linearly scale performance.
Our customers typically characterize our product as the “user or client facing side of NAS” and the traditional filer as the “archive or data management part”. The most frequent request from our customers has been “Now that you implement the client facing side of NAS, can you do something to help with our NAS clutter?”
NAS Clutter
NAS clutter is the result of the current NAS 1.0 architecture that was not built to scale performance or handle the challenges of geographically distributed users. The NAS filer is the single bottleneck in the NAS environment – all operations from all users must transit the filer, much like single CPU processors were the bottleneck in computers until the advent of multi-core architectures. The NAS 1.0 architecture worked well a decade ago but has severe limitations today.
Towards NAS 2.0
Global namespace and the virtualization of storage resources is an important building block for scaling out the NAS architecture. When you combine global namespace with Avere’s dynamic media tiering and scale-out clustering you have the genesis of NAS 2.0:
- Global namespace removes NAS clutter from the user view – separating the client facing NAS services from datacenter administration.
- Dynamic media tiering and scale-out clustering hide mass storage and WAN latency, facilitating the use of high density (low cost, low power) media and remote Cloud storage.
NAS 2.0 and Cloud Storage
Avere’s performance scaling permits enterprise applications and end users to access remote storage with no degradation in performance over local storage. The deployment model places an Avere FXT cluster near enterprise applications or end users. Storage can be located anywhere. The added benefit of GNS in this model is that storage components can be located at several locations with a single access point for all users at all locations – creating a single view of storage for distributed enterprises. GNS effectively hides the additional clutter of multiple locations for these distributed enterprises.
