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Ron Bianchini, Avere Systems President and CEO

New and emerging market trends have placed the storage industry at the proverbial fork in the road. Do businesses try to boost the performance of their existing NAS architectures by adding additional hard disk drives to the environment? Or do they replace their lower-performing, energy-hungry hard drives with new storage media, such as solid state in their NAS systems to gain the performance improvement they're seeking?Before committing to either approach, businesses need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each option and decide whether an even better solution can be found.

As traditional NAS architectures more frequently succumb to the performance demands of today's increasingly robust applications, IT administrators are faced with costly methods of short-term gains in a futile attempt to squeeze more life out of existing NAS servers. To handle higher volumes of read and write requests, some organizations feel the need to constantly upgrade to the latest, most-expensive generation of HDDs. The decision to implement new, enterprise-class Fibre Channel drives not only results in the cost of installing additional disk but also hits the bottom line in OPEX costs from the power, cooling, management, and floor space needs required of the additional hardware. For best performance results, storage administrators often overprovision HDDs, wasting a significant percentage of their raw capacity. Adding additional disk drives is a costly and largely ineffective method of increasing NAS performance.

New storage media such as SSDs, whether in the form of Flash-based PCI cards or Flash-based arrays, seem promising in their innate ability to overcoming the performance limits of HDDs. However, implementing these solutions into NAS systems is very costly and even more expensive to scale. Flash must be deployed to handle the highest levels of performance the system will experience in a day.

Another solution — one that leverages the benefits of both HDDs and SSDs — can be the answer that resellers' customers are looking for. A tiered NAS appliance enables performance acceleration of existing NAS infrastructures while lowering the costs of NAS acquisition, operation and expansion. These solutions also allow for less expensive, lower-performance NAS servers and lower-cost, high-density media such as SATA HDDs to expand NAS infrastructure, increasing performance and extending the useful lifespan of legacy NAS systems.

Tiered storage solutions provide high performance across a wide range of workloads by accelerating read, write and metadata operations. In addition, these operations are accelerated across the full range of access patterns, including random access to small files, sequential access to large files, and a mix of both. Tiered NAS architectures meet the needs of most applications because they provide high performance on a single appliance and linearly scale performance as appliances are added to a cluster. In small-file, random access tests, they can achieve millions of operations per second. In large-file, sequential tests, they can achieve tens of GBs per second of throughput.

Because of its placement in the storage environment, tiered storage systems, like the Avere FXT Series of NAS appliances, provide visibility into all activity between the mass storage server and clients and application servers. Monitoring tools that locate potential problems, such as especially demanding clients or application servers, heavily accessed files, and slow or overloaded NAS servers, can help to balance demand across the storage network by distributing workload across different clients, adding capacity to the mass storage server, or increasing NAS server performance by clustering multiple appliances.

Tiered NAS makes it simple to maximize the density and performance of NAS infrastructures while minimizing the costs of administration, equipment, power, cooling and rack space. In today's "do-more-with-less" business environment, having such a channel friendly product that provides a clear value proposition for organizations is an ideal solution for an industry at the crossroads. Taking the tiered NAS architecture approach might be a road less traveled but will surely make all the difference.