Skip to Content

Scale-Out Storage: The Gold Standard for Complex IT Environments

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 organisation’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.

What Is Scale-Out Storage?

Scale-out storage is a network-attached storage (NAS) architecture that abstracts away the details of the underlying hardware so that you can expand system capacity as a single resource pool without creating data silos when new servers are added.

Scale-out storage offers an innovative alternative to scale-up architecture. It’s based on nodes that you can manage and monitor from a single pane of glass. The nodes are similar to scale-up storage controllers, but nodes have visibility into only the disks they’re attached to. Each node contains its own disk storage capacity, as well as its own memory, CPU, and networking resources to help enhance performance.

Instead of adding more storage disks to an existing pair of controllers, you can incrementally add more nodes to a dynamic cluster of nodes that form one large, easily expandable resource pool.

Scale-out storage delivers endlessly flexible scalability and allows organisations to seamlessly add storage capacity as they grow. It eliminates silos and simplifies storage management and upgrades.

Benefits of Scale-Out Storage

Scale-out storage provides support for high-capacity, high-performance workloads that require low latency. It greatly reduces disruption to operations and makes storage efficient and easy to manage.

Scale-out storage also:

  • Eliminates scalability limitations and storage silos with flexible, dynamic clusters
  • Increases user productivity with a single pool of searchable data
  • Reduces the cost of scaling by allowing incremental growth and helping avoid overprovisioning
  • Delivers consistent performance because controller resources are added along with capacity
  • Protects data better with self-healing properties built into the cluster
  • Improves operations with the ability to nondisruptively replace old nodes with new ones
ANNOUNCEMENT
2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Report

11X A Leader*, 5X Highest in Execution and Furthest in Vision

Pure Storage is named A Leader again in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Primary Storage Platforms, positioned highest in Execution and furthest in Vision.

Pure Storage Can Help Improve Your Storage Experience

Pure Storage® has a range of scale-out storage solutions that can deliver the capacity and performance you need for your most specialized workloads. Pure can help you modernise your storage system, whether you’re looking for all-flash performance, robust public-cloud storage, storage as a service, or a solution that’s powered by artificial intelligence.

04/2025
Navigating the New Landscape of Data Management
Explore the impact of AI integration challenges on the landscape of data management and how the Pure Storage Platform can help.
White Paper
6 pages

Browse key resources and events

MAY 19-22, 2025 | BOSTON, MA
Portworx at Red Hat Summit 2025

Discover how Portworx and Red Hat work together to power modern virtualisation.

Register Now
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Betting against Data Gravity: A Fool's Errand

Dive into global namespaces and the history of related buzzwords that appear as a response to data gravity.

Read the Article
PURE360 DEMOS
Explore, Learn, and Experience

Access on-demand videos and demos to see what Pure Storage can do.

Watch Demos
ANALYST REPORT
Stop Buying Storage, Embrace Platforms Instead

Explore the requirements, components, and selection process for new enterprise storage platforms.

Get the Report
Your Browser Is No Longer Supported!

Older browsers often represent security risks. In order to deliver the best possible experience when using our site, please update to any of these latest browsers.