"In contrast to IBM's holistic approach, BlueArc, NetApp and Panasas attack the I/O challenge differently. BlueArc and Panasas primarily leverage the evolving architecture of the Parallel Network File System (pNFS), which allows clients to access storage devices directly and in parallel. NetApp's secret sauce is something called a performance acceleration module (PAM).
"The pNFS architecture eliminates the scalability and performance issues associated with older NFS servers in deployment today, said Gerard Sample, senior manager of product marketing at BlueArc, whose Titan products support both NAS and SAN.
"Sample said pNFS is important because it brings together the benefits of parallel I/O with the ubiquitous NFS standard."
