Revisiting the storage stack in virtualized NAS environments

Cloud architectures are moving away from a traditional data center design with SAN and NAS attached storage to a more flexible solution based on virtual machines with NAS attached storage. While VM storage based on NAS is ideal to meet the high scale, low cost, and manageability requirements of the cloud, it significantly alters the I/O profile for which NAS storage is designed. In this paper, we explore the storage stack in a virtualized NAS environment and highlight corresponding performance implications.