Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 BroadcastAsia Special Edition | Page 33

Rethinking SAN and NAS
High-resolution, high-vol-
ume media workflows such
as collaborative 4K editing
and visual effects cre
ation demand extreme per-
formance and scalability
from the underlying stor-
age infrastructure. To meet
these requirements, con-
tent creators have tradi-
tionally used high-through-
put storage attached net-
works (SANs) as the de
facto solution for demand-
ing tasks such as color cor-
rection, visual effects and
collaborative editing. Fibre
Channel SANs have offered
the necessary guaranteed,
predictable
bandwidth
between workstations and
shared storage that such
operations demand.
Due to network process-
ing overhead that can cre-
ate latency, conventional
Ethernet-connected NAS
solutions have traditionally
been best suited for opera-
tions unaffected by latency,
such as file transfers and
non-real-time activities. In
spite of performance limita-
tions, NAS systems do offer
benefits in terms of ubiq-
uitous client access since
popular NAS protocols are
built right into the operat-
ing systems of the client
workstations and servers.
Simplicity has also been a
traditional benefit of many
NAS systems. For exam-
ple, adding capacity is as
simple as plugging in a new
NAS node, and clients enjoy
immediate access to that
new storage resource.
While in the past, NAS per-
formance has not stacked
up well against the perfor-
mance of high-throughput
SANs, new enhancements
to NAS offerings for the
media and entertainment
industry are reshaping the
role that NAS systems can
play in modern media work-
flow.
Indeed, there is no shortage
today of NAS solution pro-
viders. But despite the need
for robust, high-performing
on-premise storage in the
form of NAS, these pro-
viders largely have fallen
short in providing com-
plete offerings. They simply
don’t address the full set
of requirements associated
with modern media work-
flow. While some solutions
offer essential features and
management tools in an
end-to-end solution, they
often lack a flexible, cost-
effective path for scaling.
Those that do offer cost-
effective scaling cannot
always deliver on features
and management tools.
Many NAS users have found
that they have needed to
adjust their workflows to
work around the limitations
of their storage infrastruc-
ture.
To realize critical improve-
ments in performance,
media organizations must
look to a new and improved
generation of multiproto-
col, multiclient NAS solu-
tions.
Using NAS to Address
Modern Performance
Demands
By uniting shared storage
with robust data manage-
ment, the latest scale-out
NAS offerings not only
support demanding collab-
orative workflows but also
ease users’ transition to all-
IP workflows.
Using a parallel file system
to distribute data across
the nodes in scale-out stor-
age — essentially a build-
ing-block architecture —
today’s NAS offerings can
spread data access loads
across all the resources
available in a system, sim-
plifying the scaling of both
performance and capacity.
Within an advanced NAS
solution, a cluster can scale
performance and capacity
together or independently
to reach hundreds of pet-
abytes in capacity and more
than a terabyte per second
in aggregate performance.
Leading solutions can also
support dual 40-GbE con-
nectivity, with 50- and
100-GbE speeds on the
horizon. Some NAS offer-
ings even deliver the same
performance and capac-
ity as a SAN at a frac-
tion of the cost. The math
is simple: upgrading to an
8- or 16-Gb fiber backbone
can cost up to three times
more than a comparable
Ethernet fabric. Finally, the
most advanced NAS solu-
tions are able to combine
both NAS client access and
SAN client access into a
single shared storage sys-
tem, thereby allowing users
to customize their storage
to any requirement of their
Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 33