Network Attached Storage – hey that sounds pretty cool. That should be kinda like iSCSI? Ahh – no. NAS is the buzzword for what used to be known when I was a young boy as a File Server.
WOW – a real file server? yep, it’s that astounding. Somehow I have trouble getting all excited here. File servers have been round for a while now. NAS boxes come with an OS installed, and the discs on some type of RAID. I’m still not excited.
I just can’t fathom the value proposition here. Discs cost you the same amount weather you buy them in a NAS box or a File Server. The base hardware costs about the same, or if you save money it’s cheap junk. The OS costs you the same OEM or in the File Server.
If you get a Linux based one you have no NTFS permissions and it runs SAMBA. You may as well not bother with Domain at all – hey, there’s some less costs if you don’t need domain controllers.
Either way, Linux or Windows, they didn’t intend you to screw with the OS too much, so running AV, Backup agents and Updates can be interesting from a support perspective.
“But you can install your Exchange Databases on it” – well, yes you can. Same as you can install them on any file server. And get crap performance. 1GBit Ethernet is 3.5 times slower than 320MByte SCSI channels. I’ll stick with local SCSI thanks, at least I know the discs are dedicated.
So it’s a box on the network running SMB. That’ll definitely revolutionize the world. I think I’ll just stick to throwing more discs at my current file servers.
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