July 11th, 2007
Wireless NAS - A solution in search of a problem
One of the most dubious product categories I’ve ever seen was the Wireless NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. I’ve seen some of these devices in stores and I’ve seen people asking for a Wireless NAS device. I find it dubious because it’s clearly a solution in search of a problem or it’s people wanting wireless for the sake of wireless. Now don’t get me wrong; there’s definitely a place for wireless storage devices in our future but NAS is not one of the legitimate applications and I’ll explain why.
Wireless connectivity is for mobility applications or hard-to-reach places where wires won’t reach or aren’t easy/cheap to deploy. For example, we might want a Wi-Fi or UWB (Ultra Wide Band) Wireless-USB enabled digital camera, MP3 player, or cell phone so that we can easily walk up to any device and just start sharing files without having to worry about plugging things in. If you’ve seen Microsoft’s “Play Table” AKA Milan technology where someone sets a digital camera on to a video display table and the pictures literally spill on to the table. Those are really useful human-friendly innovations that I welcome with open arms and it’s not just for the techno-phobic, it’s very appealing to the computer geeks too. Performance may not be the best but that doesn’t really matter because it’s good-enough for the application.
A NAS device is something that needs to be ultra high performance with massive amounts of storage. A NAS device if it’s for the business is just a rack-mount box stashed away somewhere in the datacenter where it has the convenience of a power strip and gigabit (or even 10-gigabit) ports nearby. A NAS device for the home typically fits in one or two hands and can be stashed away anywhere next to your router/switch. It’s not like a computer printer that has to be at a certain location for easy access. You physically have to walk to a printer routinely but you almost never need to touch the NAS device. A wireless Printer makes plenty of sense if hardwire Ethernet connectivity isn’t readily available, but wireless on a NAS device is just silly.
The only close to a wireless NAS is a wireless Firewire/USB enabled hard drive that allows you to record HD video from your Digital Camcorder to a remote storage device but that’s a point-to-point application for replacing a single wire and not a network device. And before someone asks me, no I am not aware of such a device but it would definitely be cool and doable since HDV 1080i video only requires 28 mbps and wireless USB/Firewire using UWB technology or possibly even 802.11n (5 GHz recommended) would definitely work very well. Current solutions use hardwire Firewire and they’re fine but I’ll bet any cameraman will agree with me that not having to connect an extra cable or not having to carry one more piece of gear on his body would be welcome with open arms.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
