Microsoft® Windows Storage Server 2003 White Paper
NAS Deployment Scenarios
The following are common NAS deployment scenarios.
•
File
Serving
•
Server
Consolidation
•
Local and Remote Site Replication for Business Continuity
•
NAS-SAN
Fusion
File Serving
Businesses need reliable file servers that can provide highly available data at a reasonable cost. Off-
the-shelf, general-purpose servers are not typically configured with fully redundant hardware
components. Using a general-purpose server for file serving and running applications can
compromise both tasks. In particular, file serving can be negatively impacted by the overhead
associated with running applications, as well as by the risks of system crashes should an application
fail. General-purpose servers have the additional disadvantage of being platform specific,
necessitating a different file server to serve clients on different platforms.
In contrast, NAS filers confer a number of advantages. NAS appliances are designed for high
reliability: they are built with redundant disks, NICs (for failover data paths), and power supplies.
This redundancy of hardware components makes NAS devices highly reliable file servers helping
to ensure highly available data.
Because NAS devices built on Windows Storage Server 2003 are dedicated file servers, they do
not carry application overhead, and they are not vulnerable to application-related problems.
Moreover, because Windows Storage Server 2003 supports multiple file sharing protocols, file
serving to clients on Windows, Unix or Macintosh computers, and sharing between them, can be
accomplished without the need for a specialized file server for each platform.
