[ Thanks to Paul
Shread for this link. ]
“Truer words could not have been written, and they
still ring true today. I am fond of saying that there are no new
engineering problems, just new engineers solving old problems.
Today SAN and NAS still dominate the market. Many of the tradeoffs
are the same, but change is coming.“While not much has changed in the nearly eight years since that
article was written, there are some big changes on the way,
particularly for NAS:* The introduction of NFSv4.1 (pNFS) has the potential to put
NAS performance on a par with SAN. NAS vendors are going to have to
change their file systems to provide better scalability, however.
Up to now, between the performance limitations of NFS and Gigabit
Ethernet speeds, it was not important for vendors to have scalable
file systems.* 10GbE is faster than the current SAN fabric performance of
8Gbps Fibre Channel and it is far less expensive (see Falling 10GbE
Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel).“With SAN shared file systems, sharing data from multiple
machines in a SAN is now possible. It was not possible to easily
share data across SANs in 2002, because shared file systems were in
their infancy.”