Enabling Limitless Scalability and Easy Storage Management with Scale Out NAS Storage

Enterprise NAS storage – A solution to storage woes

For most organizations, there is a growing need to store more data. The exploding growth in unstructured data has created an urgent need to expand storage capacity in a way that is both efficient and cost-effective.

To meet this need, IT professionals are increasingly turning to scale-out storage. Scale-out storage allows organizations to easily and efficiently grow storage capacities in increments as needed, rather than forcing them to buy large amounts of storage that might not be required for many years.

Scale-out NAS storage enables organizations to add new capacity by adding additional nodes or shelves instead of purchasing large amounts of capacity all at once. This allows IT teams to manage their costs and their capacity requirements more effectively.

In this article, we will explore the major challenges faced by most businesses in terms of storage and how scale-out enterprise NAS can be a solution to these problems.

Storage challenges faced by businesses

While traditional storage systems are cost-effective, they cannot scale further when the data growth is exponential. With data exploding by the minutes, most organizations are experiencing problems with storage scalability, difficulty in managing the storage, and scattered data with multiple users accessing the data with intensive workloads.

The servers quickly reach the end of their life and need upgrades, resulting in deployment of new storage from scratch. Furthermore, a large volume of data is accumulated that demands a greater and scalable storage capacity. What is even worse – with traditional storage solutions, the infrastructure is supported by tones of storage silos that cause management headaches for administrators.

The disparate hardware like switches, different servers, and the storage itself require special attention separately, which results in a waste of time and less productivity. Additionally, most organizations still use tape storage for their backups—such legacy hardware results in slow and inefficient backup processes.

The need of the hour is a next-generation enterprise NAS solution that delivers high performance and easy scalability and is affordable, easy to deploy, and manage.

Why would you need a super scale-out enterprise NAS solution?

Here is the case for large-scale NAS storage:

You have large amounts of data to store, especially unstructured data that is growing rapidly
You need high I/O and throughput, as well as high availability, so that you can access this data quickly
You want it to be easy to manage and to scale-out as your needs grow

Enterprise NAS – A solution for storage woes.

Enterprise NAS scale-out solutions provide a highly scalable storage infrastructure, can be rapidly deployed, and are easy to manage and organize.

Highly Scalable Infrastructure

The distributed nature of scale-out storage helps companies anticipate future capacity and performance needs. Companies can start with a small cluster and add nodes to meet current demands. Adding nodes to the cluster is simple, non-disruptive, and does not require downtime or data migration.

Unlike traditional storage with a fixed number of drives in a cabinet, scale-out storage adds drives within the cluster to increase capacity and performance. As storage needs grow, users can simply add additional nodes.

The best NAS systems can quickly scale out to thousands of nodes and deliver petabytes of storage along with the proportional performance increase. Enterprises can start with a single system and scale up to several petabytes without the need for lengthy, disruptive, or expensive forklift upgrades. The architecture allows enterprises to add capacity in small chunks as they grow, enabling them to flexibly scale storage capacity to meet today and tomorrow’s requirements.

StoneFly’s super scale-out solutions are an excellent example of highly scalable storage. It comes with automated storage tiering with load balancing capabilities. Furthermore, the StoneFusion operating system dynamically balances data across all the drives in the cluster to maximize total system performance and capacity utilization.

Simplified storage management

Super scale-out NAS system provides a single namespace for all clusters, allowing users to manage their files from one location. It offers tools for provisioning, monitoring, and managing multiple nodes from a single GUI interface, thereby enabling IT administrators to spend less time managing their storage infrastructure. In addition, its advanced features, such as end-to-end checksumming, ensure data integrity at all times.

The centralized management of enterprise Network Attached Storage eliminates many complications like provisioning, configuring, upgrades, and patches. This, in turn, increases business productivity and business continuity.

StoneFly’s scale-out NAS solutions provide a single namespace across the cluster, giving you control over all storage resources from a single point. You also get a consistent user experience from any node in the cluster. This makes it easier to manage storage infrastructure, especially for organizations with multiple offices or distributed sites.

Rapid and easy deployment

Standard storage systems require manual configuration of the storage system and storage pools. The provisioning process is slow and error-prone.

Super scale-out enterprise NAS storage is designed for rapid and easy deployment. You can do it quickly and easily, with as little downtime as possible. It delivers incredible performance right out of the box – there’s no need for tedious configuration or setup procedures.

Super scale-out NAS allows for fast, simple, and automated provisioning with a few clicks.

Summary

To keep up with the increasing demand for storage capacity and performance, there is a need to scale the storage infrastructure rapidly and cost-effectively. This is essential when your organization manages petabytes or even exabytes of data. The best way forward is to deploy a super scale-out NAS storage system that can easily handle enormous amounts of unstructured data and provide limitless scalability.

Built on a modular architecture, super scale-out NAS lets you expand capacity by simply adding nodes to the cluster — with no limits on how many you can add. You can also grow performance independently from capacity by adding nodes as needed, allowing you to tailor the solution to your specific infrastructure needs.

Super scale-out NAS storage is a revolutionary approach to storage management that makes it easy to consolidate unstructured data and simplify management while also delivering efficiency and scale, enabling IT organizations to do more with less.