There are a broad range of products available depending on the size of your business. Here is a breakdown of market segments which outlines how NAS products are used, their main features and pricing.
Consumer NAS – Consumer NAS is derived from low-end traditional NAS, but is evolving into a very different product that focuses on the converging digital home. This device is defined as a centralised, multifunction storage system for the home network. It can function as a file server with remote access to multiple PCs and media players, a print server, a media server, a backup and archive system, and temporary storage for Internet downloads or video on demand.
Vendors in this segment are scaling up their systems to house 12 bays and support iSCSI and virtual server environments broadening the product use for different applications.
SMB NAS – This refers to entry-level NAS storage systems ideal for the small business. It excludes products in rack-mount form factors. Their feature functions are geared more toward a business environment, rather than a home, and include the support of Microsoft Active Directory and Access Control List. Midmarket NAS – This segment deals with small businesses and branch offices of midsize and large organisations. These environments have widely deployed general purpose file/print servers using direct-attached storage (DAS). They are often installed by resellers as SMBs have limited in-house resources. The average price range for these products is $5,000 to $24,999.
Midrange stand-alone NAS – In this segment of the market Gartner uses two price bands - $25,000 to $49,999 and $50,000 to $99,999. These two price bands together grew 49 per cent in revenue in 2010, according to Gartner. In this segment NetApp, EMC and IBM captured a combined market share of 80 per cent in revenue last year.
Rinnen said user demands for the midrange stand-alone NAS segment will be strongly influenced by sales of unified storage, which supports NAS and SAN simultaneously out of the same system. “Important use cases for this segment include directories, file sharing, host virtualization and easy, affordable backup/recovery,” he said.
High-end stand-alone NAS – The average selling price in this segment of the market begins at $100,000 or more so we are talking about a significant investment in storage. In 2010, Gartner said revenues for this segment grew by more than 51 per cent. The focus in this high end of the market is on unified storage for data centre consolidation, as well as scalable NAS environments.
Technology trends
Use of commodity operating system platforms is leading to an increasingly blurred line between NAS and Storage Area Network (SAN) storage arrays. Today, vendors have added array capabilities and both iSCSI and FC support to their NAS devices. At the same time array vendors have added NAS file sharing capabilities to their arrays. This merging of the two types of storage device is likely to continue as arrays and NAS devices become increasingly software driven.
There are even arrays that run next generation file systems such as Sun’s Zettabyte File System (ZFS). Building on a file system like ZFS means that host volumes are created as virtual volumes contained within the ZFS, with the array simply mapping physical storage to the file system.
Standards
Prior to purchasing any storage product it is important to buy according to industry standards and best practice. Performance benchmarks for products are also useful.Gartner analyst Nik Simpson suggests using an independent source such as the Storage Performance Council. “For too long, useful storage benchmark results have been almost impossible to obtain, with vendors providing numbers based on workloads bearing little resemblance to real-world situations,” he said.
Moreover, when it comes to industry standards for storage management, Simpson said the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is the only game in town.
“Vendors hate doing side by side tests with rivals and customers simply cannot spare the time. That leaves standard and independently audited benchmarks as the only way for customers to compare performance,” he said. Therefore, an informative resource for potential buyers is SNIA’s website.