The NAS Market Begins To Take Shape - network attached storage - Industry Trend or Event

Computer Technology Review, April, 2000 by Gerry Humphrey

The market for low-end Network Attached Storage (NAS), which is actually a special example of the emerging network appliance category, is beginning to take shape. All signs are that there is an enormous pent-up demand among small and medium-sized businesses for backup and file sharing services without the overhead of a general-purpose server. NAS products meet these and other data storage needs in the form of a cost-effective, highly robust, and virtually zero-installation and maintenance solution. The emerging market for these devices is interacting with other trends in the storage market such as the progression towards drive interfaces that handle higher levels of abstraction and the resulting reduction in the cost and complexity of the electronics required to connect storage to the network. Complicated and, at times, fiercely competitive interactions between niche NAS producers, OEM PC and server suppliers, network vendors, and hard disk drive companies will help to shape the NAS market as it explodes in the next few years.

Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly adopting networking and the Internet in order to improve processes and information flow within their organization and with customers, suppliers, and business partners. A major obstacle in their path is their limited budget and lack of technical personnel and expertise. In many cases, these businesses don't have the resources to purchase, install, and maintain complicated technical solutions such as network operating systems and traditional general-purpose servers. Managers of these businesses are well aware that today's servers are expensive to purchase, install, maintain, and upgrade. Studies show that storage management cost is approximately seven times the original acquisition costs. This is, without a doubt, the main reason why a recent survey taken by Seagate Marketing Research shows that only about 13% of companies with 2 to 49 employees now use networks, compared to just over 60% of companies with 50 to 99 employees.

Tremendous Business Opportunity

The fact that only 13% of the 7.7 million companies with two to forty-nine employees now have servers provides a tremendous new business opportunity for current and future NAS vendors. The survey further indicates the main reason that small and medium-sized businesses install a network is to obtain additional storage, most commonly to provide client data sharing of files and databases and backup. Of the respondents to the survey, 43% said data sharing was their main reason, 16% named applications, 11% cited backup, and 11% said growth was the main reason. The survey further indicated that the primary applications for entry-level servers are file sharing (45%), printing (38%), database (37%), applications (31%), communications (20%), Internet (18%), and other (21%). In terms of purchasing motivation, client backup was shown to be the most powerful purchase motivator while strong interest was also shown in file sharing applications.

The emerging NAS devices can fill these needs because they are far simpler and less expensive so they are well-suited to small and medium-sized businesses with a small or nonexistent information technology infrastructure. They are normally designed to perform only the limited number of functions required to deliver network storage, including management of network traffic, file system I/O, user authentication, and their own system management. These devices also eliminate keyboard, serial and parallel ports, video, network I/O, disk I/O, memory management, and the processor hardware required to support them. To reduce costs, these devices typically use low or zero-cost operating systems such as Linux.

Simple Installation And Maintenance

As a result, NAS products install in minutes, require minimal ongoing maintenance, and provide unparalleled ease of use. They provide users, regardless of their technical background, with the ability to add or remove network storage without any downtime to the existing environment. NAS products also do not use a traditional network operating system, so they can support as many clients as necessary without incurring per-seat licensing charges. Web browser-based management allows the appliance to be installed, monitored, and maintained from any browser installed on the clients on the network and from any operating system. The hardware is far less expensive than traditional server-attached storage because the NAS doesn't need to support a wide range of functions. The systems also generally have far greater availability because their simplicity eliminates many of the things that can go wrong on a conventional server.

It's interesting to note that network appliances focusing on storage applications emerged from the market for Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices targeting high-end storage applications. NAS products were originally developed to offer higher reliability and performance than general-purpose servers. These high-end NAS devices offer an architecture that is optimized to move file data as efficiently as possible from disk to network and vice versa. A typical such device uses the I/O node containing several processors with different and logically separate processing functions as a fundamental building block. The network processor processes network protocols and manages associated caches. The file and storage processor is dedicated to managing the file systems and associated storage hardware. The result is a dramatic improvement in reliability and performance compared to general-purpose servers.