How to manage huge amount of data using filestream since only local paths are supported for data storage?

Question

As pointed out in this question when using filestream with sql server 2008 the data must be stored locally. This means that I cannot use

\\FILESERVER\FileStreamData\MyDatabase

for Filestream filegroup path.

So if I need to use filesrteam and have lots of data, is buying a very large hard drive the only solution (this could be quite limiting in many scenarios)? It is not possible to use a NAS? Typically one installs SQL Server on a perofrming machine but keeps the large documents in a NAS or anyway on some fileserver. With filestream this is not possible, so how to do it?

Answer 1

Note that you can partition your FILESTREAM table to distribute the FILESTREAM data across multiple disks.

Regarding NAS, see this article by Bob Beauchemin where he says "Note that the filegroup needs to point to a local file system location; filestreams can't live on a remote server or a network addressable storage (NAS) devices unless the NAS device is presented as a local NFS volume via iSCSI."

It indicates that if the NAS device is presented as a local volume via iSCSI, it can be used to store FILESTREAM data. (I have not tried this though)