The network-centric file management appliance: overcoming the challenges of enterprise file services

Computer Technology Review, Nov, 2004 by Rajeev Chawla

Regardless of the size or sophistication of NAS installations, the challenges of enterprise file services are well known to the majority of storage managers in the industry. From departmental CIFS or NFS file servers to enterprise NAS deployments, a common set of well documented issues arise--including file management, scalability and utilization rates--and enterprise end users now increasingly understand the rocky road involved with managing independent NAS devices as discrete "one-off" resources.

While NAS continues to satisfy the universal need to share and provide network file access, these independent NAS devices exist as "silos," isolated islands of file serving resources that impact enterprise applications. Management is complex, scaling is difficult, and clients are statically mapped to file resources so that changes to file servers directly impact users. But in a few months, this will change. The innovations that are soon to be released will redefine the ways enterprise users address NAS infrastructures, and next generation approaches promise to give existing NAS infrastructures the scalability and manageability that enterprise storage administrators have been longing for.

Cornering the Elusive Target

As we create an over-arching solution to address file management, we must explore capabilities that businesses require to manage the enterprise in a manner that delivers maximum return on investment (ROI). These capabilities include:

Infrastructure-wide file views: As NAS file serving complexity increases, users seek to have a centralized representation of their files and assets at the enterprise and departmental level. And as business-critical needs increase, the ability for unified namespace becomes crucial to simplify management.

Infrastructure-wide file controls: Storage administrators need a centralized means to migrate, distribute and protect files, regardless of location in the enterprise. This ability to address a heterogeneous mix of storage architectures, including the range of all storage in the enterprise (including filers and Unix/Linux/Windows-based systems) is imperative to reduce operational and administrative cost.

Live management: Administrators require the ability to interact with file servers in a highly flexible and transparent fashion, seamlessly allowing on-demand capacity and performance scaling of existing servers, the easy addition of new file servers and capacity, and the migration of data between primary and secondary tier storage.

Integration with business-critical systems: Business-critical functionality, such as disaster recovery, business continuity, archiving and regulatory compliance, is vital for file-level data sets and needs to be included in the solution.

To deliver these capabilities, we are required to move beyond a device-centric NAS approach; frankly, these management activities simply can't be executed by intelligence at a device-centric level. What is needed to deliver these higher-level management objectives for file services is to move intelligence into the network, and this solution, while intuitive, has been an elusive target. That is, until now.

Intelligent, Network-Centric File Management

With the goal of creating an infrastructure-wide approach to NAS management, one needs to realize that device-centric approaches manage files statically linked to a user, while a network-centric approach manages files as dynamically accessible information, regardless of physical location or business purpose.

The key to gaining control and managing the growth of unstructured data lies in developing a network-centric solution that allows intelligent policies to be driven by file attributes, so that files can be placed on the most appropriate storage based on characteristics such as performance, cost, location, security and availability. This solution needs to deliver a unified view across all heterogeneous file servers, creating a virtual resource that can be dynamically modified without impacting users. And, if that weren't enough, the management solution must be compatible with legacy investments; be based on open-systems architectures; support heterogeneous client and server platforms; require no proprietary changes or agents; and, above all, be transparent to the user community.

Our work has shown that inserting an intelligent management appliance (in this case, a file director solution) directly into the network can deliver a transparent and highly effective solution to address the existing challenges of enterprise NAS. In this scenario, the file director appliance serves as a "virtual file server," allowing administrators to decouple the physical location of a file from the file name, delivering exceptionally compelling operational customer benefits. These include:

* On-demand capacity and performance scaling, with increased utilization of existing file servers, transparent migration to tiered storage, and the easy addition of new file servers and capacity.

* Simplified data management, with unified namespace, intelligent policies and automated reporting.