In today’s Search Storage, Arun Taneja, president and founder at Taneja Group, Hopkinton, MA, says, “The big problem with NAS is that [the devices] are islands unto themselves”. He goes on to say, “What happens if I want to move information from NAS box one to NAS box 52?”

On the other hand, NetApp says that NAS equipment solves these issues through consolidation of storage. Here is a quote from the NetApp Technical library. It comes under the heading “Key Reasons for Companies to Consolidate Storage” and says, “In the past, enterprises paid very little attention to data growth, focusing instead on database applications and servers to run them. This led to the creation of islands of storage to serve each individual database application, often resulting in underutilization and/or over provisioning of storages resources for each application. In today’s enterprise, management demands not only better access to information but an increased ROI from deployed resources.”

So which is it? Tell me what you think. Are they islands of storage, or could it be like Australia or Antarctica, a continent that looks like an Island? Is an island really such a bad thing; doesn’t Aruba sound pretty nice right now? Either way, Zerowait has the roadmap for getting your data where it needs to be.