Pete's all things sun: the "problem" with NAS
Peter Galvin · ;login:: the magazine of USENIX & SAGE · 2010
from Directly Attached (DAS) to Storage Area Networks (SAN). Along the way, Sun in 1984 invented NFS, and Network Area Storage (NAS) was born. Since then other NAS protocols have been added, most notably the Windows-based Server Message Block (SMB), a.k.a. CIFS. But throughout the history of storage, NAS has been regarded as poorly performing and unreliable compared to SAN and DAS. Certainly NetApp’s creation of a NAS “appliance” helped move NAS from being a science project to a mainstream production solution, but in my opinion NAS is still underappreciated and underdeployed. Perhaps in light of the new generation of NAS appliances, that will change.