Home areas etc, NAS or File Servers still?

[Lanz]

Hi

Im wondering whats the `industry standard` nowdays for home area storage / departmental shares etc?

Currently we have clustered file servers attached to SAN, which then gets mapped to client h: drives. Quota's etc are managed through windows, all very standard.

Is this still the best and easiest way for handling shares or do people nowadays use a NAS head on their arrays and point client desktops straight to the appliance (hencing removing the file servers and all the time and effort put into managing them)

Im still confident in the proven file server method (although now virtualised etc) but the new guy wants to scrap them and use NAS for everything.


Cheers

 

[bigredshark]

I don't see a big management difference either way, both approaches integrate with AD etc

NAS heads tend to be faster and more expensive as a rule, they also seem to do high availability I little more intelligently than windows file servers. On the other hand windows boxes support DFS-R which isn't to be underestimated for large organisations, I think Windows boxes with a SAN backend at each office talking DFS to each other is a very powerful approach. If you need absolute speed though, head units specialise in providing it...