What is Cloud NAS?Ĭloud NAS is the equivalent of your NAS device, but hosted in the cloud. The upside is that in case there is a performance or network bottleneck, you can easily migrate Virtual NAS devices to hosts with better specifications. That’s because all of the user requests pass through an additional hypervisor layer. However, it should be noted that Virtual NAS storage does have a performance dependency on the hardware in which the virtualization platform is installed. It could be as simple as adding more virtual hard disks to the Virtual appliance. Capacity management is also easier since any required storage can be allocated from the underlying virtualization layer. Network devices accessing Virtual NAS storage can continue to do so using the same protocols without any reconfiguration. Since the entire appliance is virtualized, there is no additional investment required to scale up Virtual NAS as there is with their physical NAS counterparts. It offers data storage services to other machines in the network, the same way that a physical device would do. Virtual NAS is the virtual appliance version of NAS systems that can run on virtualization platforms such as VMware, Hyper-V, etc. NAS units are popular in SMBs (Small and Medium Businesses), but are also used by enterprises for another of other reasons, including: All current NAS devices use an extensible architecture, which allows you to increase the storage capacity either by adding more disks or by connecting it to other storage units. NAS is a centralized storage appliance that allows applications and services to access data from a centralized location in the network.

In this blog, we will discuss the relevance of NAS hosting in Azure and how Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help you here with advanced data management capabilities. NetApp Cloud volumes ONTAP is one such cloud-based storage solution available in Azure which can provide best in class cloud based NAS services over NFS and SMB/ CIFS for your workloads. With exponential data growth being a common concern, cloud-based NAS is often one of the preferred solutions for enterprise customers. The familiar approach of accessing and using NAS storage will work, without the overhead costs of procuring, configuring, and managing an actual NAS storage box. This is a great way to begin cloud file sharing.

This technology gives organizations storage that’s as performant as their on-prem NAS with the added ability to scale in the cloud-and all without having to make major changes to their existing application interfaces and processes. Cloud-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) helps you address storage needs in the cloud using the same constructs as an on-premises NAS system.

Nas box storage