Latest Contributions by Todd_Metzler

The "final answer" between NAS and SAN depends on the perspective of the person providing the information.  My perspective is GIS performance while my organization SAN administrators are interested in most benefit to most user base.  Since most of our organization is in the knowledge worker category, our SAN is optimized for those workflows.  Enterprise GIS requirements may differ from from other workflows.  GIS data access tends to be more read intensive than write.  As one example, our SAN is configured in the middle of the road for read and write performance compromise for our knowledge workers.  That detracts from SAN performance for GIS. Esri recommended NAS to us.  If you have confidence in your organization for a GIS optimized SAN then  performance between the NAS and SAN should be about equal, provided the network paths provide equal performance.  If your SAN is a compromise for many users, as in our case, then suggest going with the NAS. Other tidbits:  We store our Mosiac Data Set (MDS) source tiles on SAN.  Recently our SAN solution was changed from Dell/EMC to Cohesity.  The Virtual IP management, firmware and connection logic in the Cohesity SAN environment required a number of patches to get ArcGIS Enterprise to reliably access those data stored on the SAN.  So another plug for NAS.  Unless you want to compete with all other SAN users in your organization and compromise to make GIS work. last tidbit.  So why am I not following Esri recommendation and moving my largest data sets to NAS from SAN you might wonder.  Resource limited.  A NAS set up (2 NAS really for redundancy and fail over backup) costs money and optimized for GIS Enterprise makes the NAS resources a "stand alone" storage solution that doesn't benefit other users in the organization. Good Luck! Todd ... View more