Network Direct Attached Storage

Network Direct Attached Storage (NDAS) is a proprietary NAS type system, patented by Ximeta, for connecting external digital storage devices such as hard-disks, flash memory and tape drives via ethernet networks. Of interest, unlike other, more common forms of networked storage such as SAN and NAS, NDAS devices do not use TCP/IP to communicate over the network. They credit this as enabling them to achieve higher through-put rates via the LPX Protocol. NDAS also supports RAID, aggregation and mirroring.

Issues

Drivers required to operate NDAS devices over a network are not currently shipped with operating systems. The devices are usually accompanied with client driver software for Windows operating systems, which is common.

• Drivers for Unix-like operating systems (i.e. LINUX, MacOSX) are available from the manufacturer Ximeta. Current Unix-like Operating system drivers for NDAS devices don't allow shared read and write access. In those environments it is not possible for multiple network devices to read and write the NDAS device.
• Also, environments in which multiple machines wish to access the networked device or in a RAID configuration can result in data loss or corruption.
• Starting with Mac OS X 10.6.7 (March 2011) the Ximeta drivers do no longer works. A remedy has been promised in May 2011 but not yet implemented.

External links

• Ximeta Official link to Network Direct Attached Storage
• Open-source management interface for the Linux NDAS driver