First off I would look at a product that offers SAN and NAS capabilities. You don't want to be locked into one thing. Eventually you may want to store SQL DB's or Exchange stores on there.
Second, look at the software available with the devices. What can it do for you? Can it do snapshots, backups, replication? You can resize volumes on the fly? Can you dedupliate data? What about storage for your VM's? There are tons of "NAS" devices out there that are simply a ton of disk jammed into a container that you can attach too. It won't do anything more than storage. But the real story today is what can you make that storage do for you? From: RM [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 3:45 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: At what point do you replace file servers with a NAS device? Today, in the world of Server 2008, servers have VSRM reporting, flexible and granular soft/hard quotas, the ability to expand volumes, the ability to grow RAID containers (with the right RAID controller), the ability to participate in advanced 2003R2 style DFS replicas, and volume shadow copy to support the client's Previous Versions tab. 2008R2 will add BranchCache. In light of all this, at what point can you successfully argue in favor of a NAS device? Is there a certain amount of TB's where servers become unreliable or untrustworthy? Is an enterprise NAS device really better than a clustered file server in front of SAN storage? Would love to hear everyone's thoughts... RM ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
