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What About A Home SAN?

 

David Mould Submitted by David Mould on May 19th, 2008

The greatest change that the SAN market could make is to jump from the exclusivity of the enterprise into the home market.

As the multi media home starts to develop and more and more devices enter the space previously occupied by the PC a cost effective SAN would become the centre of the home.

Why a home SAN?

Server to storage - traditional transport but with the high bit rates offered by SANs would allow for portability of large files (think High Definition movies) being moved around the home. Servers are replaced by PC’s, DVD’s, games consoles and HiFi’s most of which have some element of computing technology built into them.

Server to server - using a home SAN as a fast transport service would allow for fast sharing and recycling of files. Download a file from the internet on your PC (say a purchase from iTunes) and have it moved to your media centre or hard disk on your DVR for playback on your HD TV.

Storage to storage - moving files between storage elements with the intervention of a server. Back up files to DVD, move files from your DVR (TiVo) to your PC to watch whilst your travelling.

What home devices would you connect to your hom SAN?

  • PC
  • Laptop
  • Games console (Playstation, Wii, Xbox360)
  • DVR (DVD recorder, TiVo)
  • DVD player
  • Podcast device
  • Photo storage

As home working becomes more viable having SANoIP would also provide back up service for your work to aid disaster recovery and sharing of data between users.

 

3 Responses to “What About A Home SAN?”

  1. Mike Kramer Says:
    May 19th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

    David,

    I believe you are referring to simply a media server. A real home SAN would abstract the storage devices from the rest of the hardware. So your PC, laptops, game consoles, DVR’s and mobile devices would not have local storage (or at least not use it for data), and would all have a standard connection or interface into the Storage Area Network, where you would centralize all of your storage for these devices. With all of the vendors thinking they have the best technology, it would be difficult to have them agree on a standard for this.

    What you are describing sounds more like a media server and a LAN. All of your devices would be on the same Local Area Network and could all write to or replicate with a central storage device. It’s more of a NAS on a LAN or just a media optimized server on a LAN than a SAN.

    A SAN would need high speed connections separate from the data network to just service storage requests.

    Also with so many companies reluctant to implement SANs due to the cost, why would a home consumer consider such a thing?
    The Playstation does at least half of the things you describe, so would a RAID-1 home made server running FreeNAS on a regular LAN.

    Perhaps I am missing something.

  2. Cuyler Says:
    May 20th, 2008 at 10:44 am

    I agree with Mike above. It’s happening at the NAS level slowly. The Synology CS-407 seems to be getting there. I have a friend who has that hooked up to his home network with an XBOX running XBMC. The Synology even has the capability to handle bit torrent downloads itself.

    I do know a lot of folks that although they’ve had a network for years they’ll only every used it to connect to the external world. Now with NAS boxes getting more popular they are using their networks for storage. Although it’s not a dedicated SAN we have networks that are 90% storage dedicated.

    The biggest problem I have with this jump from SMB to the home is the the general population does not like giving up any space to protection. When presented the choice of having a 1 TB of storage or 500 GB of protected storage more often than not people are going after having 1 TB. It’s a scary world with the amount of unprotected and not backed up data that exists.

    Where I’d like to see the home storage go is expandability. The home user should be able to just add storage to their network without having to really know what’s out there. The Drobo does that on a per system basic (just add storage, just expand storage) but it’d be nice if I added a second one of these it just jumped into my storage pool. Similar to a home Equallogic type system with multiple nodes working together just on a smaller (cheaper) scale.

  3. Joseph Hunkins Says:
    June 3rd, 2008 at 3:28 pm

    Home SAN seems really unlikely to me, especially as streaming video technologies improve to the point where local storage is no longer of much value even for large video files. Will folks mess with a SAN when all they really need is a decent broadband connection?

    I suppose a specialize home SAN market could evolve for people who wanted to have a huge video collection - say thousands of HD titles?

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