Industry analyst Gartner has declared that scale-out storage is the next big thing within the industry as SMBs and large enterprises both look at ways to meet their growing storage demands.
Gartner predicts that there will be an 800 per cent increase in data growth by 2015[1], driven by the expectation that everything, including every email, document and image can be stored. To address data growth without interrupting business operations, organisations need to know the difference between the two scale storage options available and purchase the right storage for their business.
The two scale methodologies – scale-up and scale-out – both have their own place in managing today’s complex storage environments. The processes of scaling up or scaling out storage systems both result in additional storage capacity. In that respect, they address the same short-term need. However, in many other respects, the approaches are very different and will affect the performance, management and resiliency of your storage system.
Previously scale-up storage was the more traditional storage choice - offering the ability to add more HDDs (hard disk drives) or other capabilities to a storage device until a limit is reached. At this point, the device is replaced with a more robust product and data is migrated from old to new. While this is a straightforward growth plan, it can often result in a large impact on the budget during the initial investment, and again when the unit needs to be replaced.
However, scale-out storage has taken the storage sphere by storm, giving users the flexibility to purchase storage as and when they need it. Scale-out storage is not only challenging the technology landscape; it’s also changing the business models of key storage vendors – leaving room for nimble storage vendors to compete with larger vendors such as EMC, Dell and HP. Scale-out storage allows businesses to grow storage resources in-line with growth. This means that the system can expand with business performance and nodes can be added as and when they are needed. Therefore, this system transforms the IT infrastructure by drastically cutting costs, eliminating silos of storage and allowing managers the flexibility to purchase storage based on actual requirement.
Another difference between scale-up and scale-out storage is resiliency. Scale-up systems generally rely on RAID controllers and standby disks for data redundancy and the use of a standby controller for component redundancy. Alternatively, scale-out storage achieves data redundancy by mirroring data stripes across all nodes in the scale-out cluster, resulting in every byte of data existing on two different nodes. If one disk or even an entire node fails, other nodes in the cluster automatically assume the additional workload without any interruption to users. Thus, scale-out storage guarantees business continuity allowing cluster nodes to work simultaneously with each other without any interruption to users.
Evidently, scale-out storage is dominating the storage market and the reason for this evolution is simple: IT mangers need to cut costs, increase scalability control and make their storage systems more convenient to manage. This, coupled with the virtualisation boom, has caused managers to purchase scale-out over scale-up systems, with the financial and scalable factors being the biggest attraction. When deploying a virtualisation strategy, many businesses have come across unplanned additional spend on storage and networking infrastructure, as well as software, causing their budget to increase. However, businesses that use a scale-out type storage solution will not face this problem as they can acquire storage to fit the needs of their virtualisation strategy and business growth.
Much of the storage industry and channel community is witnessing scale-out storage appearing at all levels of the storage environment. The technology has overcome several obstacles that IT professionals face today, including achieving scale, performance, reliability, upgradeability and ease of administration. This type of storage has seen a paradigm shift in the market place where it is changing the rules of how data is stored and processed. With Gartner’s prediction of inevitable data explosion, it is vital to educate companies on the different storage solutions and their business benefits available to them today.
[1] Gartner report: Infrastructure and Operations - Top Ten trends to watch, 18th November 2010, Ray Paquet
