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I have heard arguments in the past that data can only be reliable when served off of the server that is accessing the data. Data performance was another argument. I was leveraging data delivered over IP/Ethernet before those antagonists were coerced into coming to terms with efficient management of large data.
Here are topics related to data storage and managing data on a network.
I have worked in shops where there are a significant number of high end technical workstations deployed throughout the enterprise all needing to share the same application related data. Most open systems shops seem to only service one, possibly two platforms and all the related data is only accessed by a single host. Fifteen years ago NAS appliances became of age and provided for better ways for managing data apart from just consuming it and dealing with both the logical and physical limits that localized block storage traditionally provided.
Potential for less performance. This has been highly debated. There are trade-offs here in that you at the end of the day, you have a pipe and multiple layers between physical storage and the presentation of a file system in some form. An example from the past that is applicable here is that of a sound system. If any component (microphone, cables, sound board, speaker) from the source to the speaker is inferior, so will the sound quality.
Consumption over a network is configured by a set of rules for what host and which user can access the data. It is harder, though not impossible, to manage where that data is being consumed.
The advantages outweigh the disadvantages in my book. Any potential performance degradation (I’ve actually seen better performance when tuned correctly) is minuscule and is outweighed by the efficient centralized management of the data itself, particularly for backups and disaster recovery. Managing data is a universal issue that takes good architectural design to provide a system for defining responsibility and accountability beyond how the data is consumed.
While our kids were growing up, administering upward to 8 computers at home, most of which were running Windows XP at the time was onerous for me. I would have one Saturday a month applying updates, scanning for viruses, malware and re-orging the disks. What we lacked was data backup.
I put my kids to the test as to why they needed to run Windows. I put a Fedora Linux desktop out in our game room and had the kids do their work and play on that machine and to tell me what software they needed that would only run on Windows. After a month, we discovered that there was no need to run Windows. OpenOffice and Firefox would work for all their school related tasks and the games they played were all in Flash or Java off the web.
After the expirament was over, I repurposed all the other Windows based desktops with Fedora Linux (outside of my wife’s desktop – that took more convincing). I implemented NIS for identity management and deliver automount maps along with serving all the home directories off of my desktop via NFS. Standing up an LDAP server wasn’t worth the hassle for such a small user base and security wasn’t that critical. I later bought a full height computer that I could stuff with several hard disks and imaged it with FreeNAS, a BSD UNIX OS running ZFS as the file ssystem developed by iXsystems. iXsystems provide a commercial hardware/software solution suitable for small to possibly medium businesses.
It worked real well for delivering data over NFS to all the desktops. The only residual problem I then had to deal with was the whining of the kids as to which desktop they wanted to use. Performance-wise, the desktops had different processor classes and memory footprint. Of course the kids only wanted to use the one machine that was the fastest! NFS performance was never an issue.
Today, iXsystems have consolidated their community version of FreeNAS as TrueNAS Core. TrueNAS utilizes the BSD UNIX “jails” to provide more services than merely supplying a filesystem over the network. I am currently working with a packaged NextCloud jail to see how I like being able to access files from tablets and phones.
For backups, I simply perform an rsync of the data onto a USB drive. So far, this is possible since I have less than 2TB of data. Using a Linux based backup software did not make sense to add complexity into mix for such small amount of data.
You can read more about TrueNAS at (https://www.truenas.com/)