SuffolkOnline.net

This article is about NAS or as it is otherwise known as Network Attachted Storage. Basically is a external hard drive that you can plug into your router and once setup can save your files to it so other people on your home network can see. This could be word documents or itines music library if supported. 

The past two decades have seen the emergence of Ethernet as a storage networking fabric, with Network Attached Storage (NAS) in the 90s, To date, these technologies have been viewed as niche markets when compared with the incumbent storage networking technology. despite the fact that each of the markets has consistently grown faster than the market as a whole.

owever, we may be close to an inflexion point. According to the latest IDC Worldwide Storage Systems Tracker, Ethernet Storage grew to 51 per cent of the networked storage capacity shipped in 2010,it seems reasonable to anticipate that Ethernet storage will soon become the revenue market share leader..

Network Attached Storage emerged in the 90s as a replacement for traditional Unix file servers. The enabling technology was NFS – an industry standard file-access protocol. Microsoft subsequently introduced its own file access protocol, CIFS/SMB, for Windows file serving.

NAS systems connected to standard Ethernet networks and provided much better price/performance than general-purpose servers for file serving workloads, significantly improved ease-of use, and provided built-in automated data management and protection capabilities (e.g., snapshots).

Although the original niche for NAS was file sharing applications and user “home directory” storage, ease-of-use drove NAS to become increasingly popular for enterprise applications that managed data through a file system interface. Eventually all the leading DBMS systems were re-engineered to support file access, and NAS became a popular storage solution.

This broader deployment accelerated with the ubiquity of 1Gigabit Ethernet, chip-set improvements and protocol stack improvements. The release of NFSv4 in 2003 brought significantly improved security, access control and replication and migration facilities

Today you can find significant NAS deployments in support of a very broad range of enterprise applications – particularly when operational flexibility, ease-of-use and low total cost of ownership are important considerations. IDC assessed NAS revenue to comprise 30 per cent of the networked storage market in 2010, with 46 per cent year-over-year growth.

Ethernet is one of the few fundamental and truly ubiquitous technologies in IT today. Ethernet Storage has expanded from a collection of niches to become a significant percentage of the networked storage today. Today’s trends and emerging technologies will inevitably drive Ethernet Storage to become the preferred infrastructure for tomorrow’s IT environments.

Article Courtesy of The Register