Serving up the next generation for Network Attached Storage

By NETGEAR. Jawed Karim's 19-second film "Me at the zoo" features in more than one list of the most influential movies of the decade. Why? Because it was the first clip loaded on to YouTube by the site's co-founder.

Jawed Karim's 19-second film "Me at the zoo" features in more than one list of the most influential movies of the decade. Why? Because it was the first clip loaded on to YouTube by the site's co-founder.

The fact that it was made as recently as 2005 may also give you pause for thought. It is a measure of how far networking has come in an astonishingly short time - and how much we take the vast bandwidth and huge storage capacity now available to us for granted.

Less than a decade ago, the idea of sending files as rich and dense as movies across the Internet was still an ambitious concept. We could see it coming, but we could not anticipate how much everything would change.

Back then, storage was becoming a challenge. Now, it is right at the top of the industry agenda, with the technology racing to keep pace with the expectations of users who are becoming accustomed to sending big files across mobile networks, let alone wired corporate backbones.

It is always instructive to think like a user when you are designing a new piece of technology. Busy sales people or human resources executives probably know little about the systems they use every day. But if they can download movies at home, or stream TV, then they expect to do the same at the office.

They send emails with movie attachments or uncompressed image files, often to multiple recipients, so that the files are regenerated over and over again. They create presentations that occupy hundreds of megabytes on corporate servers, when it would have been as easy and far more efficient in capacity terms to create simple word processor files.

As businesses large and small begin to migrate towards virtualisation, the problems of storage, bandwidth and accessibility become even more critical. The Service Oriented Architecture of virtualisation assumes an optimised network, with servers that can deliver applications and a wealth of other resources as rapidly as if they were stored on local machines. Any bottlenecks in the infrastructure can undermine the entire strategy, compromising return on investment and substantially reducing the productivity of the users.

Which is why network attached storage, or NAS, has evolved at such an incredible pace. Costs have fallen dramatically with each new development, and performance has gone the other way, with writing, retrieval, search and transfer speeds spiralling ever higher. Today, NETGEAR® SMB customers are using the latest generation of ReadyNAS® network storage systems as the foundations of enterprise-like virtualisation strategies, often utilising legacy servers for functions such as application production and backup.

Strategies like this use NAS in an active role, in which storage systems are delivering key services, rather than acting simply as passive repositories for files and data. The approach has moved to a new level since the ReadyNAS family has been certified as compatible with VMware®'s industry-leading ESX 4.0 virtualisation solution.

With this development, the entire ReadyNAS product line can be fully integrated with VMware, using the Network File System (NFS) protocol, from the desktop ReadyNAS Pro and ReadyNAS NVX, to the rack-mountable ReadyNAS 2100 and 3200. 

VMWare compatibility means that SMBs can use ReadyNAS to reduce their server and storage costs, while simplifying infrastructure management and flexibility. Those in the earliest stages of virtualisation can cost-effectively implement a certified ReadyNAS with VMware solution and eliminate dedicated file servers, while current ReadyNAS users can easily deploy a VMware solution without having to invest in additional storage capacity.

ReadyNAS also now supports the Remote Agent for Linux and UNIX Servers (RALUS) for Symantec Backup Exec™ for Windows Servers. Installed directly on ReadyNAS appliances, the Symantec-produced Backup Exec agent communicates directly with Symantec Backup Exec software, providing significant performance improvements for backup, restore, archive and disaster recovery solutions in Backup Exec environments. By improving communication between Linux-based ReadyNAS systems and Backup Exec servers, RALUS dramatically increases efficiency and enables significantly reduced backup and restore times.

NETGEAR is also placing ReadyNAS firmly at the forefront of cloud computing, with the integrated ReadyNAS Vault hosted storage service. ReadyNAS Vault software supplied with the latest ReadyNAS systems connects to an enterprise-class Web-based storage infrastructure. Users can determine what they want protected and the software automatically and securely copies it to the offsite system. Once the content is stored, users can confirm results, make changes, and recover files, even for multiple systems, from any Internet location.

The ReadyNAS 3200 is one of the latest additions to the ReadyNAS family and it brings together the full range of benefits delivered to SMBs by ReadyNAS on a single platform. ReadyNAS 3200 offers high-end features such as redundant power supplies and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports at an SMB price point, enabling growing businesses to share, store and protect business-critical data securely across the network. The system offers up to 24 TB of capacity, making it ideal for server virtualisation, file sharing, disk-based backup and online storage consolidation. Its versatility and capacity make it a robust and future-proof NAS option for SMBs.

Enterprise IT teams have long been moving towards virtualised infrastructures. Now they are increasingly looking beyond, into the world of cloud computing. Yet any business, of any size, can benefit from the new architectures. The cloud in particular is infinitely scalable, creating as many new possibilities and benefits for businesses with five users as it does for those with 5,000.

Now, the NETGEAR ReadyNAS family is turning virtualisation and cloud computing into practical and affordable options for SMBs. With competition intensifying in every market, and costs under extreme pressure while the last effects of the crunch still linger, the savings and efficiencies delivered by these Service Oriented Architectures could mean the difference between survival and disaster for many growing businesses. After all, somewhere out there, the next Internet phenomenon may even now be uploading its first, seemingly unremarkable files.