Network Support for Network-Attached Storage

While many storage products are directly attached to personal computers, most disk array products (65% and rising) are deployed in local area network file servers. This centralization of storage resources enables effective sharing, better administrative control and less redundancy. However, it also increases dependence on network and file server performance. With the emergence of high-performance cluster systems based on commodity personal computers and scalable network switching, rapidly increasing demands on storage performance are anticipated. Specifically, storage performance must cost-effectively scale with customer investments in client processors, network links and storage capacity.