Storage is often on my mind these days. I was recently going back through some data and found a presentation from last February. It's quite relevant and well worth the time to watch. It is a 19 slide presentation presented by Ben Rockwood5 of Joyent. It's called, "NFS: A Customer Perspective, Bridging the Gap Beween Research and Production."1 Nothing like a litte light reading to clear the mind!
In summary, it is a bit Joyent centric which is fine because they are doing really cool stuff but you'll learn about OpenSolaris2, NFS, and iSCSI strength's and weaknesses. You'll get some hints about the Joyent Accellerator3 platform. Finally, you'll get plenty of search bait4 to carry on searching and learning afterwards.
From a Business Perspective:
The crux of this is that if you choose and use your technology wisely and manage it even more wisely then you can indeed save time and therefore money when it comes to scaling your applications.
Resources:
1. NFS: A Customer Perspective - http://www.cuddletech.com/Connectathon2007.pdf
2. OpenSolaris - http://www.opensolaris.org/os/
3. Joyent Accellerator Platform - http://www.joyent.com/accelerator
4. Search Bait - Information gleaned from a search, document or target that provides informationf or futher searches, informaiton, or targets.
5. Ben Rockwood Blog - http://www.cuddletech.com/