NAS is Neat Storage Basics — continued

By removing storage access and its management from individual Web servers, both application programs and data can be delivered faster, because they are not competing for the same processor resources.

The storage machines are also highly streamlined—they can access the local network, but not the Web, and therefore do not bear the burdens of processing e-mail, DNS, or other functions. Focusing on storage makes NAS machines more efficient at doing their job.

The network attached storage device is attached locally (typically Ethernet), and assigned an IP address. This way, file requests are mapped by the main network server to the NAS file server. Files are then sent from the NAS system to requesting Web servers, using standard, time-tested network protocols developed for the UNIX and Windows environments, named NFS (for UNIX) and CIFS (for Windows).

NAS machines rely on banks of disks that are usually hot swappable, meaning that you can replace or upgrade a hard disk drive attached to a NAS without turning off the entire machine. This makes is possible to add storage without taking down any element of your network services.

So the key to NAS is this separation of storage and processing power, which in turn confers these specific benefits:

• Greater server efficiency as file access processes are offloaded to the storage system.
• The ability to upgrade CPUs and storage independently of each other.

The resulting time savings and reliability improvements should add growth to your ISP's bottom line, and might even allow some shut-eye for your technical staff.

In future articles, we will delve into other types of network connections and storage systems. For now, understand that network attached storage consists of hard disk storage, including multi-disk RAID systems, and a streamlined version of the operating system software that tracks files and user permissions.

Network attached storage could be your ISP's first step toward building a more sophisticated storage system known as a storage area network (SAN). In future articles, we will continue to explore NAS, and we will compare NAS and SAN systems.

—End

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