Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Your question

NAS vs SAN (iSCSI) performance hit for clients on a network

Tags:
  • NAS / RAID
  • iSCSI
  • Networking
Last response: in Networking
Share
July 22, 2014 12:57:27 PM

Scenario: Web/Video design team.
1x Windows Server 2012 (Dell T110 II so not a beast)
20x PCs (mostly 2D design but 2x are doing 3d animation, 2x are doing TV/Video)
5x Macs (all 2D design)

Okay, this may look like a storage question but I think it's a more of a networking one.

Let's say I've just bought a good NAS (like the SYNOLOGY DS1813+) to use as the main file store for everyone on the network.

I could either connect it as a NAS or use iSCSI and connect it to the server and use it as a SAN

Now to me, the flexibility of the SAN is really appealing as it will mean I can format to NTFS, use Active Directory for file security, use whatever backup / security system I choose and best of all I can implement data deduplication.

...BUT...

The server will only really be used to share folders/files to clients over the network so bandwidth between the two isn't really the issue (if I were using it for VMs for example) but as the client will now need to access the files via the server, what are the throughput penalties likely to be? Won't having to use the server as an intermediary cause throughput to suffer? If so does anyone know by how much?

Would it be better to totally isolate the SAN from the main switch and have it on a direct link to the server or can I just shove it on main subnet and let the server see it that way? Once again, what are the likely throughput penalties that might occur here?

Do the quality of the networks cards make any difference in this scenario? There's a lot of incidental traffic and due to the video/animation work, quite a few large file transfers several times a day.

More about : nas san iscsi performance hit clients network

July 22, 2014 1:29:49 PM

It depends on the speed of your network, and how much load is already on it. If you have a fast network with a lot of free bandwidth, putting the NAS on it may not be a terrible thing. If you have a slow network, or are already using a lot of bandwidth, then you probably want to isolate the NAS to it's own network and avoid saturating your network.

Also there are NAS devices that allow you to create shares right on the NAS itself, so you don't have to connect it to an intermediary server. Just attach the NAS to the network, create the shares, set permissions(many use LDAP connections) and you're done.
m
0
l
July 24, 2014 11:45:36 AM

ss202sl said:
It depends on the speed of your network, and how much load is already on it. If you have a fast network with a lot of free bandwidth, putting the NAS on it may not be a terrible thing. If you have a slow network, or are already using a lot of bandwidth, then you probably want to isolate the NAS to it's own network and avoid saturating your network.

Also there are NAS devices that allow you to create shares right on the NAS itself, so you don't have to connect it to an intermediary server. Just attach the NAS to the network, create the shares, set permissions(many use LDAP connections) and you're done.


As I mentioned, I'd rather not got the pure NAS route due to their inflexibility. This is for a busy office with quite complex data needs. It's not the only data store on the system and there's a fair bit of Active Directory group policy stuff that doesn't translate well to *nix boxes. The two styles of security are not the same and in many cases aren't compatible (eg file encryption). Also, I want to centralise all management to one system and their backup/versioning/archiving/rollback needs to be extremely flexible, something which our current NAS boxes can't come close to managing.

It's going to need to be either a proper fileserver or iSCSI SAN to be able to manage the complexity of stuff we need it to do. I'm leaning towards a proper fileserver but if there's not a massive performance with iSCSI, I'm willing to give that a try.

We've got 100MB fibre internet link, Cat6 cabling and semi managed 1GB switch (with link aggregation) so we're already a step above most SOHO gear and we're prepared to upgrade the switch to an enterprise grade one if we have to.
m
0
l
Related resources
!