Storage capacity—and what to do when it runs out—are critical issues that can keep IT administrators up at night. A successful storage strategy is all about smart scalability. The overall objective is being able to add capacity quickly and easily without disrupting operations.
Modern IT environments have become extremely complex. That’s due to the massive growth of both structured and unstructured data, as well as the exponential increase in the number of applications and platforms running in an organization’s environment. It’s vital that any storage solution maintain the availability of data and applications while delivering the capacity and performance needed for diverse workloads.
Today’s enterprises have many options about how best to scale their storage capacity, but it typically begins with one crucial choice: to scale up or scale out? While scale-up storage architecture has been the standard for decades, today’s complex environments need a new approach. That’s why enterprises are increasingly turning to scale-out storage.
Let’s take a quick look at why.
Scale-Up Storage Can’t Keep Up with Today’s Needs
Scale-up storage is made up of drives that you can manage with a pair of controllers. When you run out of capacity in your existing drives, you simply install another shelf of drives. The controllers, however, can only manage a certain number of drives. When that limit is reached, you have to purchase another set of controllers and drives to expand the storage capacity further.
As time goes on and more controllers and drives are added, you end up with a collection of siloed systems that need to be managed separately. This can have a serious impact on performance, as well as backup and recovery times. Keeping track of which files and data are in which system can be complicated. Having to decide where workloads should reside can significantly decrease efficiency.
