Enterprises NAS storage has been around for many years now and while it is a great storage solution for many enterprises and businesses, there are still some performance challenges that need to be addressed beforehand in order to make sure that the NAS storage solution is running smoothly.

In this article, we will discuss some of these performance challenges and see how can enterprises overcome them.

Enterprise NAS Storage Performance Challenges- Metadata Bottlenecks

When it comes to metadata, arguably there are some concerns around it. In a scale-out NAS environment, there are also concerns around communication bottlenecks between the nodes in the cluster in which access to any file has to be handled individually via metadata commands.

NFS uses metadata to track information about each file that it stores. In a production NFS environment, metadata can be as much as 90% of the I/O command stream. One way to resolve this is through early detection. Detecting metadata issues early is very vital to scaling NAS to its specific capabilities.

Enterprise NAS Storage Performance Challenges- Server/ VM Latency Issues

The second challenge is server/ VM (Virtual Machine) latency issues. Poor storage performance is usually caused due to high I/O latency. It’s vital for IT admins to constantly monitor latency from the VM and to the file system for each host-to-file flow.

Users can face poor performance in the form of lags and may receive files with a lot of delay. This is generally caused by poor load balancing but careful monitoring from time to time can easily prevent this issue.

Other than this, a better approach is to monitor and analyze real-time I/O data from the VM on the server. This approach is reliable as it provides complete transparency and the user has the chance to see performance issues before hand, before experiencing them.

Enterprise NAS Storage Performance Challenges- Poor Write Performance

Writing large and sometimes sequential files over an NFS-mounted file system can cause a significant decrease in the file transfer rate. This will cause users to experience very low transfer speeds.

This makes constant monitoring critical. If the user monitors correctly and doesn’t see the expected write performance, application programmers can play with several settings and can adjust the speed accordingly to get the desired performance of the NAS device, in terms of write speeds.

Conclusion

Enterprise NAS storage, along with many benefits, also comes with some performance challenges as well. All the above-mentioned challenges can be resolved by being detected early or by constant monitoring of the system.

Another recommended approach is to use NAS storage solutions from reliable vendors like StoneFly that offer reliable services and NAS devices that are packed with features and are cost-effective as well so that you can have may be satisfied with your purchase.