Abstract: At the "2017 Hangzhou Yunqi Conference" held this year, Alibaba Cloud File Storage (Network Attached Storage, referred to as NAS) once again released technical dividends, with a price reduction of 46%, once again becoming the benchmark for cost performance of cloud storage. Alibaba Cloud NAS is a distributed file system with unlimited capacity and performance expansion, a single namespace, multiple shares, high reliability, and high availability. Not only the price/performance ratio, the Alibaba Cloud NAS family also provides products suitable for various enterprise scenarios to meet user needs.
Here, the author will analyze the entire Alibaba Cloud NAS family one by one.
There are three types of Alibaba Cloud NAS file storage: performance type, capacity type and NAS Plus.
1. General purpose NAS – (performance type/capacity type) type
NAS performance type uses SSD as a storage medium to provide high throughput, IOPS, and low latency storage performance for application workloads.
The NAS capacity type uses SATA HDD as the storage medium to provide high-performance storage space at a lower cost.
The scenarios covered by the performance type and capacity type are basically similar. The difference is in performance. The performance type is about twice the throughput of the capacity type, and the latency is 2 to 4 times lower than that of the capacity type to provide faster response. At the same time provide higher IOPS.
It can meet the needs of user business for file storage, such as business data file sharing, OA system back-end file storage, enterprise database backup target storage, business system log storage and analysis, Web site data storage and distribution, business system development and test data storage and other scenarios.
The main scenarios include:
- Load balancing shared storage and high availability. In the scenario where the load balancing SLB connects multiple ECS instances, the applications on these ECS instances store data on the shared file storage NAS to achieve data sharing and high availability of the load balancing server;
- Corporate office file sharing, corporate employees need to access and share the same data set, administrators can create NAS file systems to provide data access for individuals in the organization, and can set file or directory level user and user group permissions;
- 数据备份，用户希望将线下机房的数据备份到云上，同时要求云上的存储服务兼容标准的文件访问接口；服务器日志共享，将多个计算节点上的应用服务器日志存放在共享的文件存储上，方便后续的日志集中处理与分析。
2、NAS Plus类型
NAS Plus是针对行业定制的超高性能文件存储，比如面向 4K级非编、基因测序、影视渲染等对数据吞吐、处理要求极高的业务。
性能上与通用型NAS不同的是，吞吐能力不受存储量的影响。为了达到超高性能，需要在计算节点（ECS，Docker等）安装Windows/Linux定制的客户端文件系统模块。
下图是某客户利用NAS Plus在阿里云上搭建非编系统的案例。NAS Plus为NOVA在线非编系统提供高吞吐的IO能力，满足云上非线性编辑的业务需求。
阿里云NAS产品得到客户的广泛认可，目前主要集中在互联网文娱、生命科学、互联网科技、互联网生活、互联网金融、房地产&制造传统行业、广电传媒等行业，使用范围非常广泛。
在2017云栖大会上，阿里云副总裁李津宣布容量型NAS产品降价46%。
不仅如此，在应用了全新一代阿里云分布式存储引擎之后，阿里云NAS性能相比上一代吞吐提升5-10倍，IOPS提升2倍，并且是全球唯一同时提供NFS和SMB协议的分布式文件系统。
具体说来，有以下六方面的特性：高性能，共享的文件系统；多协议支持，SMB和NFS协议；弹性，可按需购买；安全，高可用性；可以行业定制化，通过定制化的Windows/Linux Client提供超高性能；同阿里云其他云产品构建完整生态。
Alibaba Cloud's NAS file storage products have never stopped pursuing innovation, constantly adjusting and upgrading products according to user needs and market development. After its release in March 2016, it was commercialized half a year later, and capacity-based NAS was launched a year later. And realize the SMB protocol public beta, as well as the main domestic Region, NAS full service. In August 2017, Financial Cloud was launched, NAS Plus was tested publicly, and the performance of NAS products was further optimized. In October this year, SMB was commercialized and launched on international sites, as well as proprietary cloud. I believe that in the future, NAS products will definitely bring more and better experiences to users.
Original link: https://yq.aliyun.com/articles/223459