Generally using an embedded operating system, such as vxworks/Linux, and part of the use of windows CE.
NAS (Network Attached Storage: Network Attached Storage) according to the literal and simple to say that is connected to the network, with the data storage function of the device, and is therefore also known as the "Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a specialized data storage server. It is a specialized data storage server. It is data-centric, completely separates the storage device from the server, and centralizes data management, thus releasing bandwidth, improving performance, reducing total cost of ownership, and protecting investments. It costs far less than using server storage and is far more efficient.
NAS is defined as a special kind of dedicated data storage server that includes storage devices (such as disk arrays, CD/DVD drives, tape drives, or removable storage media) and embedded system software that provides cross-platform file **** enjoyment.NAS usually occupies its own node on a LAN without the intervention of an application server, allowing users to access to data. In this configuration, the NAS centralizes the management and processing of all data on the network, offloading the load from application or enterprise servers, effectively reducing the total cost of ownership and protecting the user's investment.
Flyer Data Recovery Center provides
The NAS itself is capable of supporting a variety of protocols (e.g., NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP, etc.), and it is capable of supporting a variety of operating systems. NAS devices can be managed intuitively and conveniently through any workstation using IE or Netscape browsers.
Difference between SAN and NAS:
A SAN is a network, a NAS product is a proprietary file server or a read-only file access device.
SAN is a specialized network used as an I/O path between servers and storage.
SANs include block-oriented (iSCSI) and file-oriented (NAS) storage products.
NAS products can connect to storage devices via SAN
The appearance of NAS
NAS is a single-function, streamlined computer, so it is not as complex as a personal computer in terms of architecture, such as keyboards, mice, screens, sound cards, speakers, expansion tanks, and a variety of ports are not required; in terms of appearance, it is like a home appliance, only needing power supply and simple control buttons. NAS is similar to a PC in architecture, but because of its simplicity, it can remove many unnecessary connectors, controller chips, and electronic circuits such as keyboards, mice, USBs, and VGAs.
Storage advantages and disadvantages
Advantages:
NAS products are truly plug-and-play products. NAS devices generally support multiple computer platforms, and users can access the same documents through network support protocols, so NAS devices can be used on mixed Unix/Windows NT LANs without modification.
The physical location of NAS devices is also flexible. They can be placed in workgroups near application servers in the data center, or they can be placed in other locations and connected to the network via physical links. Without the intervention of application servers, NAS devices allow users to access data on the network, which reduces CPU overhead and significantly improves network performance.
Limitations:
NAS does not address a critical issue associated with file servers, namely bandwidth consumption during backups. Unlike storage area networks (SANs), which move the backup data stream out of the LAN, NAS still uses the network for backup and recovery. one of the drawbacks of NAS is that it moves the storage transaction from a parallel SCSI connection to the network. This means that the LAN must handle storage disk requests that include backup operations in addition to the normal end-user transport stream.
Because storage data is transported over a normal data network, it is vulnerable to other traffic on the network. When there is other large data traffic on the network will seriously affect the system performance; because the storage data is transmitted through the ordinary data network, it is prone to data leakage and other security issues;
Storage can only be accessed as a file, and can not be directly accessed like a normal file system to the physical data block, so it will be seriously affect the efficiency of the system in some cases, for example, large databases can not be used NAS.
Working classifications
1. Appliance-type servers
Appliance-type servers are the lowest-end products in the NAS family of devices. Appliance-based servers are not specialized add-on storage devices. They provide a storage location for the network, but they are relatively inexpensive due to the lack of redundant and and high-performance components. In a workgroup environment, appliance-based servers have many roles to play. Typical services include network address translation (NAT), proxies, DHCP, e-mail, Web servers, DNS, firewalls, and VPNs.
2. Workgroup NAS
Workgroup-class NAS is particularly well suited for small and midsize companies with relatively low storage needs, which typically range from a few hundred gigabytes to 1 terabyte. companies running e-commerce software or large databases will require several terabytes of storage, and they use what falls into the category of a mid-sized NAS. in general, when upgrading from a workgroup to a mid-sized NAS, you'll find hot-swappable drives and a few appliance cartridges that can hold additional drives or more failback products, enhanced management features, and a small increase in system complexity.
3. Midsize NAS
What we call midsize NAS solutions offer better scalability and reliability and have similar benefits to low-end NAS, such as convenience, dedicated storage space, and a simple installation and management process. The cost of these NAS devices is significantly higher compared to appliance-based servers and workgroup-level NAS.
4. Large NAS
With these types of storage devices, ease of system scalability is critical, as well as high availability and redundancy. These devices must also offer the performance of high-end servers, flexible management, and the ability to interact with heterogeneous network platforms.
Main Applications
1. Office Automation NAS Solution
Office automation system (OA) is the focus of government agencies and enterprise information construction. The management and operation of modern enterprises and institutions is inseparable from the computer and LAN, enterprises in the use of the network for day-to-day office management and operation, will produce daily office documents, drawing files, ERP and other corporate business data and information as well as many personal documents. There are generally no file servers within the traditional internal LAN, and the above data are generally stored on employees' computers and servers without a suitable device for their backup and storage applications. Due to the low security level of personal computers and the varying security awareness of employees, important data can easily be stolen, maliciously damaged, or lost due to hard disk failure.
From the analysis of data storage of enterprises and institutions, it can be seen that, in order to make the whole enterprise, the data within the institution to be unified management and security applications, there must be a safe, cost-effective, easy to apply, easy to manage the physical media to store and backup data information within the enterprise.NAS network storage server is a special design of the file storage and backup server, which NAS network storage server is a specially designed file storage and backup server, which can manage the data in the network reasonably effectively and securely, and can be used as a backup device to automatically back up the database and other application data to the NAS from time to time.
2. Tax NAS Solution
The tax industry needs a comprehensive system integrating business, information and decision support. The industry business system is mainly the tax collection and management information system, as well as tax business information and general business information. The whole system combines administrative office information, auxiliary decision-making information and business systems to form a general comprehensive system platform, thus forming a complete, integrated and integrated tax business management system.
The business data, daily office documents and data mail system of the tax industry are very important, and once the data is lost, it will bring trouble to the daily work and the tax work of the whole region. To ensure the safe operation and application of the whole data has become a real problem that must be solved in the tax industry. The solution to this problem is to store or back up these data into a safe, fast and convenient application environment, so as to ensure the safe operation of data in the tax industry.
In order to reasonably solve the problem of backing up and storing data and business information, a NAS network storage server can be used to store and back up business data and daily office data. In the business host, the information in the database is directly backed up to the NAS through the data incremental backup function. Together with the business data within the LAN and staff's daily office documents or CD-ROM-based data, they can be stored on the NAS server so that staff can use and browse these data at any time. After using NAS, administrators can effectively and reasonably arrange and manage their internal data, so that data files can be separated from other network machines, realizing decentralized storage of data and unified management of data environment system.
3. Advertising NAS solution
The advertising design industry is a comprehensive service industry integrating market research, marketing strategy, creative production, design execution, post-production and media release.
Many advertising companies have outdated data storage modes, high costs and low efficiency, with the main problems being poor data security; large overall data volume and difficulty in storing and managing a large amount of old data; the existence of multi-operating system platforms and complicated equipment that makes it difficult to **** enjoy and manage the stored data, resulting in inefficiencies; and the loss of innocent design information due to the departure of advertising designers. The use of NAS to store and backup business data in the advertising design industry network, to achieve centralized data storage, backup, analysis and *** enjoyment, based on the different requirements of the design and research units of different data, make full use of the existing data, and reasonably build the data storage platform of the advertising design industry, thus improving the speed of transmission of information data, saving time and improving work efficiency.
4. Educational NAS solutions
Since the introduction of the "School-to-School" project, schools have been actively building their own campus networks so that they can adapt to the development of the information age in a timely manner in the future. With the "School-to-School" project gradually being put in place, "Resource Access" has become the next focus of information technology construction, which is reflected in the fact that schools need a large amount of resource information to meet the needs of students and teachers. As the campus data resources continue to increase, the need to store data on physical media with high-capacity storage space and security, and to have a very fast transmission rate to ensure that the entire data security, fast access.
The campus network construction process favors the construction of network systems, equipped with a large number of advanced equipment on the network, but the network of teaching application resources are relatively scarce. The original storage model in the increase of teaching resources will show many disadvantages: due to the school's traditional network application of all educational resources are stored in a server, with high performance and high scalability of the server cost is high; access services for teaching resources will compete with the application services for the system resources, resulting in a significant decline in the efficiency of the system services; application server system failure will directly affect the resource data security and availability, giving the school the ability to access the resources. security and availability, causing inconvenience to the school's teaching work.
Aiming at these problems, NAS devices can be introduced to realize centralized storage and backup.
(1).NAS provides an efficient and low-cost resource application system. As NAS itself is a set of independent network servers, it can be flexibly arranged on any network segment of the campus network, which improves the efficiency and security of the resource information service, and at the same time, it has good scalability and low cost.
(2). Provide flexible personal disk space service.NAS can create personal disk usage space for each student user, which is convenient for teachers and students to find and modify the data and information they created.
(3). Provide an environment for online backup of data.NAS supports external tape drives, which can effectively transfer data from the server to the external tape drives to ensure safe and fast backup of data.
(4). Effective protection of resource data. the NAS has an automatic logging function that automatically records all user access information. The embedded operation management system can ensure that the system never crashes to ensure continuous resource service and effective protection of resource data.
5. Medical Data Storage NAS Solution
Hospitals, as medical service organizations in the society, the management of patients' case file information is very important. CT and X-ray based films have to be converted into digital information through film digitizers to be stored for easy searching in the future. The data volume of these films is very large and very important, the safe storage of these films, management data and information for rapid access and effective use, is an important factor in improving efficiency, but also the focus of the hospital's information technology construction issues. According to the survey, a hospital a month's data volume of nearly 500GB, such a large amount of data only by the computer storage is not competent, some hospitals will use a burner to burn the past data picture to the CD-ROM for storage, but this storage solution is more time-consuming, and the work efficiency is not high. Hospitals need a physical medium with large capacity, high security, easy management and fast data query to store and manage these data safely and effectively. Using a NAS solution can store and manage these digitized images in the hospital's radiology department in a safe, convenient, and effective way, thus shortening the time for data storage and searching and improving work efficiency.
6. Manufacturing NAS solution
For the manufacturing industry, all kinds of market data, customer data, transaction history data, and comprehensive social data are all vital assets of the company, and are the lifeblood of enterprise operation. On the basis of electronic enterprise data, the protection of key enterprise data and its rational use has become a key factor in the success of the enterprise. Therefore, centralized storage, management and backup of various data in the manufacturing industry, based on the different requirements of enterprises for different data, so as to reasonably build the enterprise data storage platform. The NAS storage method is more suitable to realize the centralized storage, backup, analysis and **** enjoyment of data, and on this basis, make full use of the existing data to adapt to market needs and improve their competitiveness.
In summary, in terms of data management, NAS has a great advantage in certain data expansion faster, higher requirements for data security, heterogeneous platform applications in the network environment more fully realize its value. In addition, NAS has an extremely high performance-to-price ratio and is widely suitable for a wide range of application environments, from small and medium-sized enterprises to large and medium-sized enterprises.
Underlying protocols
Some people believe that the essential difference between NAS and SAN lies in Ethernet and FC, and that the fate of the two is tied to the TCP/IP protocol. SANs use SCSI transport over FC. iSCSI, as a new protocol that bridges IP and SCSI (which has matured for use on FCs), is seen as a major event affecting the fate of SANs. These essential differences are in terms of network architecture, and for many users concerned about the performance differences between NAS and SAN, the essential difference also exists in the file read and write implementations.
NAS uses NFS (Sun) to communicate with the Unix camp and CIFS to communicate with NT and Unix, which also reflects the fact that NAS is based on the operating system's "file-level" read/write operations, and access requests are based on "file handles + offsets. The access request is based on "file handle + offset". Handles are smaller units than processes and are often used for inter-process communication, resource location, etc. The interface between computers and storage in a SAN is the underlying block protocol, which is located in accordance with the protocol header "block address + offset address". From this point of view, SAN is inherently storage heterogeneous integration of storage virtualization capabilities. Below we introduce the soul of NAS file ****sharing - NFS and CIFS.
NFS (Network File System) is a method of implementing disk file ****sharing between Unix systems, supporting applications on the client side of the network to access the data located in the server's disk a file system protocol. protocol. In fact, it includes a number of protocols, the simplest network file system is the network logical disk, that is, the client's file system through the network operation is located in the remote end of the logical disk, such as IBM SVD (*** enjoy virtual disk). Now generally used between Unix hosts Sun developed NFS (Sun), which can be realized between all Unix systems file data access, and gradually become a standard between hosts *** enjoy resources. In contrast, the network file system used by SAN, as a high-level protocol, requires special file servers to manage the disk data. Clients access the data in logical file blocks, and the file servers use block mapping to access the real disk blocks and complete disk format and metadata management.
CIFS was developed by Microsoft to connect Windows clients and servers. After redevelopment by Unix server vendors, it can be used to connect Windows clients and Unix servers to perform tasks such as file *** enjoyment and printing. Its earliest origin was NetBIOS, an API developed by Microsoft to implement Windows name-based resource ****enjoyment on a LAN. after that, the NetBIOS-based NetBEUI protocol and the NBT (NetBIOS OVER TCP/IP) protocol were created. the NBT protocol was further developed into the SMB (Server Message NBT protocol is further developed into SMB (Server Message Block Potocol) and CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocols. CIFS is used on Windows systems, while SMB is widely used on Unix and Linux, and the two are interoperable.The SMB protocol is also known as the LanManager protocol.CIFS can be enjoyed by communicating with servers that support SMB***. The Microsoft family of operating systems and almost all Unix servers support the SMB protocol/SMBBA package.
But the latest news is a little bit worse -- Microsoft has withdrawn support for the CIFS protocol in critical applications such as Exchange. On its Web site, Microsoft says the CIFS protocol requires data to pass through a customer's network equipment, which tends to create performance bottlenecks. The move was slammed by the industry.
Jeremy, one of the developers of the SAMBA open-source software, said fear of Linux and an attempt to use its dominance in desktop operating systems to protect sales of the Windows server operating system were the real reasons Microsoft rejected the CIFS agreement. network Appliance, one of the leading makers of NAS equipment, also has said that Microsoft's move was "irrational and greedy."
NETWORK PURCHASE
For those who are ready to build a network, the use of a NAS device in a network means that you don't have to buy a traditional file server, which can dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership, since a NAS is already a capable file server. At the same time, NAS devices can also work well with application servers to improve the overall performance of the network.
For users who have already established a network, NAS devices can be used in conjunction with existing file servers to greatly protect the user's upfront investment.
The NAS can also be used in conjunction with multi-functional servers, which reduces the pressure on the servers and saves more time for other applications, thus improving the performance of the network.
Once the user has determined the basic architecture of the storage system, we need to make product selections. Capacity and price is of course one of the main points to consider, but these two factors are very easy to conclude, so it will not be difficult for users to purchase, just to pay attention to not let the investment in equipment idle, but also to leave a certain amount of upgrade space. Product procurement is really difficult to comprehensively examine its inherent performance and functionality, including data security, performance, connectivity, manageability and additional features and other aspects.
Security Data security refers to the design aspects of the storage device, for a variety of contingent errors and unforeseen circumstances are expected, as well as to take preventive or remedial measures. Users need to be aware that the storage system is a complex system from soft to hard, so the evaluation of the ability to protect data should take into account the entire system.
Performance The main performance indices for NAS products are OPS and ORT, which stand for the number of concurrent requests that can be responded to per second and the average response time per request, respectively. NAS is generally considered to have excellent performance in environments where small files are frequently read and written to, such as the Web, e-mail, and databases.
Manageability Manageability is one of the most important characteristics that any IT product must have. First of all, users should consider whether the management functions or methods provided by the product are practical and reliable, such as remote Web management, automatic alarms, and so on.
Collaborative working ability This is not a problem for NAS because NAS devices are just accessory devices. Still, users should consider this issue carefully, especially if the system is highly secure and full of various security authentication mechanisms.
Storage comparison
Traditional database servers are usually configured with high-capacity memory, clustered high-end CPUs, and local attached storage to form a large and complex architecture. The main reason for this configuration is that the database server must simultaneously perform a variety of services such as: print services, filename services, file services, databases, routing, tape backups, RAID arrays and utility services. All services are to consume the server's memory, CPU resources, in the process of multi-level data processing, processors and disk controllers may be access to the main memory address and competition, thus making its core database services efficiency is greatly reduced, so how to optimize the hardware configuration of the database services has become a priority.