I think it depends on what your needs are. A project team next to me is doing an n-series NAS upgrade at the moment. We have around 6-7 large state HQ sites (largest has around 10K users) and it's not feasible to put a file server cluster backed by SAN in each large office, nor is it feasible to have all that file/CIFS traffic flowing back to the main data centres where the enterprise SANs are.
Instead they use n-series NAS devices (which are sold by the incumbent outsourcer). As data storage requirement seem to be growing by around 50-100% a year, the ability to add more trays of disks is a positive. Though at some point something needs to be done around managing data growth. Windows does have VSS (but de-duplication options are still a bit limited - e.g. you can use DPM, but that's not exactly the world's greatest product), but even VSS can be flakey... Cheers Ken ________________________________ From: RM [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, 25 April 2009 8:45 AM 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/> ~
