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NAS saw an explosive growth, but CIOs should also consider the benefits of
consolidation
Companies that have deployed a NAS
system and have multiple NAS devices start to realize that perhaps these are too
small. The thought process is that with another consolidation there would be
greater savings. In the past there have been deployment of NAS boxes where an
individual department might install one, then another department would install
one.
Most
NAS devices today are individually administered.
When more space is needed and another NAS device is installed, there is
additional administrative workload. That becomes an issue of scaling. One other
item that has been an issue is that most NAS devices today do not provide any
centralized point for capacity planning. There are some SRM tools starting to
become available that have that capability. However, those are currently in the
early stages. This centralization
and the common NAS box have similar benefits as consolidating file servers. This
has become a very popular option.
In
general, companies make the decision to start heading in this direction when
they have multiple NAS systems and start examining the administrative costs.
There is the realization that the company could scale up with a larger NAS
system and would be able to eliminate all the different NAS boxes. With the
savings from the product cost, the physical space, and administrative time, the
upgrade can be justified.
Consolidation Options
There are several approaches being used today to consolidate multiple NAS
systems. One contends that everything is safe with a bigger NAS box. The theory
is that the company can buy a big box and have the little ones taken over by the
larger one or replaced by one NAS system. Another option is NAS aggregation. In
that case, another layer is established, a central NAS box with the other NAS
boxes hidden behind it. The advantage of that choice is-there is a single
image to manage and all of the existing equipment has been leveraged.
Scaling
Scaling involves a NAS system that is clustered so it can grow more as needed.
By adding more NAS elements into the cluster, more performance and capacity can
be realized. Many of these systems support four nodes in a cluster, while some
support as many as 16 nodes in a cluster
A
more advanced form of scaling can be done with federated nodes. These are
sometimes called storage grids for NAS. There are individual nodes that from a
performance standpoint have some amount of storage resource and a certain amount
of capabilities. Just adding one
node can scale it larger. There is the intelligence in these nodes to control
access, to distribute workload, and load balance between them and thereby become
more effective. However, the scaling is both with performance and capacity.
The industry is in the very early stages of solutions like these.
Nevertheless, it is an option that some people are considering.
Other Considerations
There will be other factors to consider post-consolidation.
These include security controls, migration of data, and changes to
management procedures.
Security Issues
After consolidation there are still the same security issues that previously
existed. Consolidation does not necessarily make the setting of permissions to
the access control list easier as that is still required.
There may be some advantage when this is a difficult process to set
security or it might be simpler to clean up some of the accesses that are
created by the process. But it is
still necessary to implement security controls.
Data Migration
It is also necessary to migrate the data. There are different approaches
available. There are some devices that allow migration of the data; basically,
there is a data mover within the devices. Therefore, the devices can move the
data from one system to another, while still allowing access. There are also
host software programs that can be used to allow that to happen. Finally, there
are devices that just move data. As data is migrated from file servers or other NAS boxes to
consolidation platform, it would be ideal to be able to move the permissions and
control lists and everything else automatically as well. To date, there have not
been any good implementations of that type of permissions relocation. That is an
area that will require a solution through future developments.
Changes in Operations
Another consideration is that the operations procedure will change. Backing up
data will be different. It will be possible to centralize things a little better
in back up, with the possibility of exploiting some capabilities on this
platform with point in time copy whether snapshot or clone. It will also be
possible to take advantage of some of the remote replication needs for business
continuance. There are a lot of opportunities during consolidation to a new
platform.
Most
of the time, there are going to be new capabilities, new features that are
standard with the newer platform that were not available or were more expensive
in the older platform. There will be a choice available to change operation or
management characteristics, to exploit these and come up with a better
operation, resulting in either protected or a higher availability of data, or
less down time as data is backed up. There may even be the option to utilize
different pieces of software that will exploit some of the characteristics of
the device such as snapshots.
Evaluation of NAS Capacities
It is essential to consolidate, to plan for the future, and to take the time to
evaluate the NAS capacities going forward. Success depends on calculating
whether to consolidate to one box, how long this box will satisfy the needs, and
if it is being done to an environment appropriate scale. Other questions to ask
are how big will it need to get, can it be scaled up to that size, and what is
the time frame for adding more capacity or more capabilities. Also, there are
environments where the performance demand becomes more critical. When
consolidating, ensure that what is being consolidated can support all the access
required, including response time and bandwidth.
These
are important decisions that require a complete understanding because uninformed
decisions could create a bottleneck or an oversubscribed resource when
consolidating. That is why some of the scaling solutions have more opportunities
because they can add more capacity and performance capabilities simultaneously.