We’ve recently had some questions coming through the Ask the Storage Advisors link about networked storage in the home. For the more technically savvy it may seem simple to just plug in some network capable storage device into your home network for sharing or even take the easy way out by simply getting one (or more) of those handy USB drives and plug it into each device directly as you need it.

With digital home media sharing becoming more desirable, the former (networked storage) is much more desirable than the latter (captive USB storage). To further complicate file and media sharing in the home, many find themselves with mixed environments where they may have one system running some flavor of MS Windows, another running a version of MacOS, and possibly another for the more adventurous running a downloadable version of Linux. For most, these various systems fulfill very specific needs, but in the realm of media sharing, it’s suddenly desirable to be able to create or save content from one device and be able to share that content to another system without having to hold a degree in Computer Science.

In storage networking terms, this is usually accomplished using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device via heterogeneous file sharing - in other words - sharing content located on a single storage device that can be accessed by unique platforms with unique network file sharing capabilities. This won’t be a lesson on what IP protocols are used to accomplish this, but just understand that generally speaking each client type (i.e. Windows vs. MacOS vs. Linux) has it’s own way of talking to a shared storage resource.

Adaptec makes a NAS device called a Snap Server available in many varieties. There are other devices that exist out there that can be plugged into a home network to facilitate simple file/content sharing. Devices that support multiple client platforms natively for access can simplify sharing media in homes with mixed client types. It allows different client types to “speak their native tongue” while all the translation happens under the covers on the storage device.

I think we’ll see many more home users out there looking for a terabyte or two to store their ever increasing collection of music, pictures and video. Imagine creating an edited home movie on your Mac and watching it on your TV using a Media Center PC based on Windows! That capability exists today for those that desire such a set up. With the new MS Vista platform coming in early 2007, I expect to see home media sharing needs go through the roof!

So don’t be afraid to migrate away from storing all of your music, pictures and video on your local hard drive. Get yourself a networked storage device so that you share your pictures of Grandma with the whole family! The sooner you start the better - I still can’t get my wife to save her pictures on my NAS device - but I’ll keep trying.

Blog ya later!

Joe

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 and is filed under General, Application Environments, Advisor - Joe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.