Document management has become one of the biggest headaches for major companies. How should documents be kept? Which level of disk is it suitable for storage? In addition to this, we must also consider other aspects, such as complying with and responding to relevant laws and regulations and industry regulations. Deploying a NAS gateway connected to SAN storage is a good solution, enabling administrators to consolidate distributed NAS filers, enhancing system flexibility and scalability, upgrading file systems for enterprises, and managing back-end storage arrays. Provided for convenience. However, the use of NAS gateways will also lead to a series of new problems. For example, NAS gateways are connected to Fibre Channel-based disk arrays through IP networks, which can easily become performance bottlenecks or single points of failure. When enterprise users deploy networks, It should be planned well.
NAS at the high end applications, often using a NAS head (NAS head) as the NAS server control terminal, connected to the optical disk array SAN or NAS head via the DAS, to provide high-performance, large A storage backend with capacity and high availability. There are two main types of NAS heads currently on the market. One is a large storage subsystem bundled with a disk array, such as the FAS980 series from NetApp; the other is a standalone device, such as NetApp's gFiler, which can store different types of storage arrays, multiple layers of storage, and even Connected to storage devices from different vendors. It is worth mentioning that the above two types of products are connected to the back-end disk array through Fibre Channel.
using a separate NAS gateway to integrate existing NAS filers, problems may arise include the following:
If many users simultaneously access files on a disk array, the system will lead to performance degradation, this It may be necessary to re-allocate network storage resources to users;
There may be many files with the same name but different access and modification time in the system. It is more troublesome to manage. You need to create a directory to determine the creator of the file. ;
Depending on the type and performance level of the disk, store different data. Since NAS gateways have added support for the iSCSI protocol, many companies have chosen it to complete file-level or block-level transport services. In addition, it can dynamically re-classify data on back-end storage arrays, optimizing both old and new. The performance of the data. Achieving support for heterogeneous systems has become the development direction of NAS gateway vendors. As their products receive more and more certifications from disk array manufacturers, users no longer need to be limited to disk arrays produced by one vendor. The product is gone. Moreover, more and more vendors are now adding support for multi-tier storage and various policy management tools, making the data migration process between different storage tiers more transparent. Since the brands and models of NAS gateway products on the market are quite mixed, it is recommended that users evaluate the performance of the products when purchasing. It is important to distinguish the following key configurations and performances:
Ethernet port connected to the server
Supports NFS protocol and CIFS protocol
Supports multi-layer storage
Manage data according to user-defined policies
Advanced storage management functions such as snapshot replication and mirroring
In addition, in combination with the future development needs of the enterprise, the following performance indicators can also be included in the evaluation scope:
Support iSCSI technology
Fiber ports that connect NAS gateways to external storage arrays
Support different brands of disk arrays
Dynamically configure and expand volumes and files Shared resources
Reclassify data on back-end disk arrays
Share files with remote sites
Support global namespaces