One way to mitigate these risks is to set triggers and alarms. You also can minimize them by influencing user behaviors and maintaining sufficient buffers of excess capacity on each server. A well-designed NAS
or SAN will let operations staff dynamically allocate additional storage in response to any of these issues. Instead of scrambling to stay one step ahead of
the storage ceiling on each of your DAS boxes, a centralized solution will let your staff work more fluidly with business and applications teams to manage spikes and surges.
So look hard at your existing metrics. If you don't have good numbers on hand, start keeping track. If a large chunk of your staff's time is spent walking the aisles of your farm to swap tapes, add drives or replace toasted components, take notice. If you're not using a solid monitoring/management package to stay on top of capacity and performance stats, start tracking how much time is spent baby-sitting each box. If you know big growth is coming, start working your numbers and talking up that you'll be able to "do more with less." CFOs just love that phrase.
NAS
Compared with direct-attached storage, network-attached storage gives you a leg up in terms of management tools, integration, cost-effectiveness and reliability. NAS systems are packaged as easy-to-install "appliances." Think of them as dedicated servers with operating systems specialized for storage.
Connecting to your LAN and using remote console management, these solutions are typically seen as a standard file share on the network. NAS enables a file system to be handled remotely (usually via CIFS or HTTP), with redirector software sending a file request over the network to the centralized storage device to serve up data. More robust solutions scale as requirements grow via modular construction, and they can provide NFS (Network File System) and SMB (Server Message Block) connections. Depending on your performance requirements and budget, you can outfit your NAS with dual NICs, Gigabit Ethernet and ATA/IDE, SCSI or Fibre Channel drives.
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