The other type of backup software is for the NAS device itself. It may mean backing up one drive to another. This is different from using one or more additional drives in a RAID configuration since RAID replicates immediately at a block and backups save changes at a set interval. Issues such as snapshot and service backups can complicate backup software considerations.
GPU and NAS?
If things weren’t complicated enough, consider the range of applications being used on a NAS device. CyberLink’s Media Show 5 is a Windows-based consumer application, but many of its features can take advantage of an Nvidia GPU installed on the PC.
For example, its face recognition feature runs orders of magnitude faster if the GPU is used to analyze images. It takes advantage of the CUDA parallel programming framework, which runs on the GPU (see “Software Frameworks Tackle Load Distribution”). The GPU can also be used in transcoding applications from resizing images to transforming video.
It isn’t too far a stretch to assume that a GPU may show up in a NAS platform. This makes a good deal of sense since many of the operations can be performed in the background. Imagine dropping the latest contents of a digital camera into a shared folder on a NAS device. A Media Show-style application could then analyze these images.
This approach has a number of advantages since the NAS box tends to run 24x7 versus a PC that may be turned off or even power down on its own since there’s no user input while the user is grabbing a snack as multiple photos are processed. An even more advanced scenario would find the GPU on a network compute device that processes the data on the NAS device.
I recently spoke with Ali Simnad, director of product marketing and business development with PLX, at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas. In addition to discussing the PLX reference design mentioned earlier, we talked about the challenges of NAS developers in handling scenarios such as these in addition to supporting the plethora of NAS options already mentioned.
Ali explained that the wide range of options is one reason developers are interested in not only the reference design hardware but also the software that comes with it. We additionally talked about the challenges of integrated applications across and within NAS devices.
NAS platform designers are discussing these issues, but there is currently no universal environment for deploying, managing, and linking NAS applications and platforms. Still, it’s a long-range goal. Many protocols like DLNA try to address these issues within their more limited purview, yet none address the wide range of possibilities. Frameworks such as Android and OSGi Open Services can help. However, it’s going to be a challenge to bring interests from backup to streaming multimedia under one umbrella.
As you may have guessed, NAS is no longer the simple file server of yore. Developing and incorporating NAS into product designs can be complex and challenging. Likewise, it is clear that multicore and multiprocessor configurations will continue to grow in the NAS arena.