NEW YORK - Network Appliance this week is expected to announce a handful of products that it claims will offer customers for the first time the flexibility of simultaneous access to storage-area network and network-attached storage data.
Having made its mark as a NAS vendor, the company's new FAS960 and FAS940 storage devices will connect to Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks, and serve data from both. Network Appliance also will introduce a version of its operating system, Data ONTAP 6.3, which enables SAN capability for the FAS960 and FAS940, while providing a higher storage capacity and larger volume sizes. Dividing disks into fewer volumes can increase performance.
While customers are excited that Network Appliance will be able to supply them with file-level NAS and block-level SAN data, they are concerned about other issues, such as performance and support.
"Network Appliance will have to prove performance and reliability before they can penetrate the [SAN] market," says Shelly Shostak, lead Unix administrator for mobile communications company Quicksilver Technology in San Jose. Shostak has two Network Appliance F760 file servers running Version 6.1.2 of Data ONTAP.
"[SAN] devices still don't play together very well. It is imperative that Network Appliance be able to provide a solution it knows works [with other products] and can provide customer support for it," Shostak says.
So far, Network Appliance has done little of the integration with other SAN devices that users and vendors find critical to SAN implementations, experts say. Sources say that Network Appliance will only announce interoperability with Brocade Communications Fibre Channel switches.
Network Appliance declined to comment on its upcoming news.
The FAS960 and FAS940 will be SAN-enabled when the new version of ONTAP ships. Until then, they operate only as NAS devices. The boxes also include upgraded dual processors: the FAS960 operates at 2GHz; the FAS940 at 1.8GHz.
Customers who have tested the boxes with only file-level capability say they are seeing a 25% performance increase over Network Appliance's F880 file server. With the upgraded processors, they see transfer times reduced by one-third.
"This increase in performance, however, doesn't factor in what will happen when SAN [capability] is turned on," says a storage administrator who asked not to be identified.
The Network Appliance devices fit into a group of arrays Gartner calls NAS gateways - devices that let users on the Ethernet network view the data on the Fibre Channel network as files rather than blocks of information.
Most arrays on the market only handle either NAS or SAN data. Vendors that have introduced NAS gateways in the past two years are storage giants EMC and IBM, and start-up LeftHand Networks. EMC introduced Celerra; IBM launched the TotalStorage Network Attached Storage 300G; and LeftHand Networks promises with its Network Storage Module 100 the ability to view block- and file-level data concurrently from their devices as soon as next month.
The market for NAS gateways is expected to grow quickly as customers want to access SAN or NAS data from one device. Gartner predicts that about 1.4 million units will ship this year, climbing to more than 10.2 million units in 2006.
The FAS960 and 940 replace Network Appliance's F880 and F840 file servers. The FAS960 will feature as much as 16 terabytes of capacity; the smaller FAS940 will handle up to 9 terabytes. A Remote Management Card also will be offered for the FAS960 and FAS940. A software product called SyncMirror, which is used on NAS-only F800 Series file servers, also will be included. SyncMirror allows two copies of a file system to be offered for fault tolerance.
| SAN/NAS convergence Network Appliance’s FAS960 and FAS940 are the first arrays that retrieve both block- and file-level data. Here’s a sampling of SAN/NAS convergence devices. |
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