I was wondering about what you guys think of NAS systems.<p>While I don't claim to fully understand the advantages brought by block storage vs. file based storage, NAS storage should be usable for most applications. If this is true than the clustered or scale out solutions offered by IBM (SONAS), HP (IBRIX) and EMC (with the recent acquisition of Isilon) might be a suitable off the shelf solution matching your scenario (probably there are some open source solutions also that I am not aware of).<p>The way I understand these solutions you can basically scale capacity and performance independently which in turn translates itself in the flexibility of achieving the ideal balance between capacity and failure point distribution/redundancy.<p>What do you guys think of this setup? Would it achieve your goals?<p>I'm coming from a corporate environment where having an off the shelf solution that is supported by some major company is as important as the solution itself.
Projects like Sheepdog should definitely kill off SANs and RAID. It can't come soon enough, as the post says, current performance in the cloud for storage is so variable. I moved away from EC2 for exactly this reason.
Really interesting to read about SAN versus local storage and also distributed block storage. The latter sounds v. cool, can't wait to see it commercially available!