Network Attached

Storage Architecture
Garth A. Gibson and Rodney Van
Meter

Requirements for Emerging

Systems
Geographic

separation of system
components

Remote data must be continuously available, and

all data must have remote copies updated
frequently to protect against regional disasters.

Requirements for Emerging

Systems
Increasing

risk of unauthorized access to

storage

Security is an increasing critical storage property

as online commerce becomes important and as
electronic crime (hacking) becomes increasingly
sophisticated and common

Requirements for Emerging

Systems
Need

for performance to scale with capacity

Differences between NAS and

SAN

NAS provides more functions than SAN.

SAN systems send more storage requests across

the network to do the same work, because clientbased file systems may have to sequentially fetch
multiple metadata blocks before they are able to
fetch data blocks.

SAN storage trusts everything attached to and

received over its networks.

Converging of NAS and SAN

NAS

and SAN provide solutions to the same

set of customer problems.

The

degree to which their implementations

are specialized for storage is increasing in
NAS systems and decreasing in SAN
systems.

Advantages of specialization
Specialization

in hardware, software, or
networking often yields more efficient use of
resources (including memory bandwidth, die
space, and manufacturing costs).

Disadvantages of
specialization
However,

specialization is costly and restricts

the market size from which its development
costs can be recovered.

Generalized

components benefit from

amortizing development costs over much
larger markets.

More specialized NAS systems

Network

attached storage, originally known

as network file service, was developed as a
side effect of Ethernet LANs and engineering
workstations.

In

1980s, Auspex of Santa Clara, Calif.,

developed an aggressively specialized NAS
system using custom hardware, an unusual
interconnect, asymmetric multiprocessing,
and a specialized operating and file system.

More specialized NAS systems

Network

Appliance and Intel of Santa Clara,

Calif., have proposed a super fileserver
architecture and a protocol called the Direct
Access File System.

The

approach is the use of PC on clusters

with a low-latency cluster interconnect based
on network interface cards offloading protocol
processing from each machines main
processor.

Less-specialized SAN systems

For block serves with many disks, Small

Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) has been
leading storage-command protocol for almost
20 years.

SAN technology today, although its signaling

and congestion control is specialized to SCSI ,
using the same physical wires and
transmission mechanisms as Gigabit Ethernet.

Storage appliances
The

Snap! Server from Quantum of Milpitas,

Calif., is an example of the lowest-price
storage appliance available today.

Internally,

it includes a low-cost small-formfactor, single-board PC attached to one or two

PC disk drives and packaged in a box smaller
than the typical PC, with only a power cable
and an Ethernet connector as external
attachments.

NASD
NASD

was a research project at Carnegie

Mellon University.

NASD
The

most common trusts client operating

systems to request and cache file system
metadata. Each client temporarily functions
as a server for the files whose metadata it
has in cache.

more secure asymmetric control-and-data

architecture places the metadata at the
device rather than at the client.

Petal
Petal

was a research project at Compaqs

Systems Research Center.

Petal

scaled by splitting the controller

function over a cluster of controllers, any one
of which had access to consistent global
state.

iSCSI
Layering

a block-level SAN protocol over

Internet protocols, such as was demonstrated
by the Netstation project at USC starting in
1991, is a natural way for storage to exploit
the influence of the Internet.

Conclusion
The

emerging systems should satisfy the

requirement weve mentioned before, such as
geographic separation, security, and
scalability.
The most apparent difference between the
NAS and SAN network storage use of
Ethernet in NAS and Fibre Channel in SAN
may soon not even be a recognizable
difference.

Thank you