Pooled storage cited in improved management

Early network-attached storage virtualization adopters also find disaster recovery, cost benefits.

For Ibis Consulting, network-attached storage had turned into too much of a good thing. With the amount of data on its NAS devices hitting 200T bytes, accessing files and managing the environment had become unwieldy, says Cliff Dutton, executive vice president and CTO at the Providence, R.I., company that specializes in electronic discovery and compliance matters.

"We don't know in advance how much disk space to allocate to a customer's project, so we wanted to have more dynamic allocation of the [disk space] than what was possible with direct management of the NAS device," Dutton says. "We would have to reconfigure the NAS device manually - that takes a lot of IT labor."

To address the problem, Ibis has turned to virtualization, a technology that a growing number of NAS customers are adopting. A recent survey from Peripheral Concepts and Coughlin Associates of 2,111 storage customers shows that 16% have virtualized their NAS environments and the number will triple in the next 12 months.

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For Ibis Consulting, network-attached storage had turned into too much of a good thing. With the amount of data on its NAS devices hitting 200T bytes, accessing files and managing the environment had become unwieldy, says Cliff Dutton, executive vice president and CTO at the Providence, R.I., company that specializes in electronic discovery and compliance matters.

"We don't know in advance how much disk space to allocate to a customer's project, so we wanted to have more dynamic allocation of the [disk space] than what was possible with direct management of the NAS device," Dutton says. "We would have to reconfigure the NAS device manually - that takes a lot of IT labor."

To address the problem, Ibis has turned to virtualization, a technology that a growing number of NAS customers are adopting. A recent survey from Peripheral Concepts and Coughlin Associates of 2,111 storage customers shows that 16% have virtualized their NAS environments and the number will triple in the next 12 months.

At the sites surveyed, data is growing at 60% a year, Peripheral Concepts says.

"Managing this high number of discrete file systems and dealing with additions, changes and migrations has proven to be a very difficult and time-consuming task," says Farid Neema, senior analyst for Peripheral Concepts. "By creating a single logical view across multiple NAS systems, NAS virtualization addresses the scaling, performance and management problems that plague NAS today."

What's available

NAS virtualization offerings come in the form of appliances and software. The products aggregate individual file systems on NAS boxes or file servers into a common pool, called a global namespace, that can be managed from a single point.

The namespace is a logical layer that sits between clients and file systems, aggregates heterogeneous file systems and presents them to users and applications in a single, logical view.

NAS virtualization products are available from a mix of established and new companies. EMC, for example, bought NAS virtualization appliance company Rainfinity, and Network Appliance last spring introduced the V-Series appliance, which handles NAS and storage-area network (SAN) virtualization.

Network Appliance says it will use its Spinnaker Networks acquisition in the first half of next year to enable its Data ONTAP operating system to span several V-Series appliances in such a way that they can be managed as one.

Start-ups get involved

A host of start-ups also has entered the market. These include 1Vision Software, Acopia Networks, Attune Systems, Neopath Networks and NuView. Except for NuView and 1Vision, these companies offer appliances that sit on the network and act as gateways to collect file-system information from individual NAS devices and present it as a single virtual file system.

NuView's implementation, StorageX, resides on a Windows file server and manages and aggregates Microsoft Common Internet File System and Unix/Linux Network File System files. Network Appliance has an OEM agreement with NuView for its StorageX technology, which Network Appliance sells as the Virtual File Manager.