What features are most important for primary storage?
Your RAID capability. Some level of RAID, whether it’s RAID 5, striping with parity, RAID 1 mirroring, RAID 6, whatever it happens to be. But then you start to get into some extra functionality, certainly with that multiprotocol support. For example, support for iSCSI is very common on these systems so that you can do block storage for your Microsoft Exchange or your SQL Servers. But support is also common for NFS or CIFS. For your Unix environments you use NFS; for your Windows environments you use CIFS; or maybe some combination of the two. Some of these systems even actually support Apple either with an AFP or some add-on capability. So that whole notion of multiprotocol and multi-interface will give you that capability. But you’re also seeing additional protocols, things like http so that these NAS systems can function as a web server, or https for secure web, or FTP servers, or BitTorrent, or WebDAV — protocols that you don’t normally associate with traditional block or file-base
