What My Used Car Taught Me About Scale-out NAS

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][mk_dropcaps style=”simple-style”]I[/mk_dropcaps] recently found myself in need of a new vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily because my current one was breaking down or in bad shape. My situation had simply changed over time to the point where my car no longer met my needs. In my case, I needed more room for a growing family and wanted better gas mileage.

Sadly, my car wasn’t designed to easily or inexpensively meet those requirements. It also started to cost me a lot more to maintain. Which got me thinking…about the interesting similarities between cars and legacy scale-out NAS solutions, and how to know when it’s time for something new.

Consider the following:

[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]The Mazda Miata[/mk_fancy_title]Your existing scale-out NAS system met the needs of your organization at one point, but now you’re finding that support costs are escalating, your system has architectural limitations that inhibit cost-effective scaling of performance and scalability, and it lacks the flexibility required to meet the changing needs of your business. Your requirements are evolving while your existing scale-out NAS environment is “stuck in the mud.” You need more flexible data protection without the heavy reliance on expensive backup software. You need an advanced storage architecture that can scale performance and capacity independently.

[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]Duct Tape, Wire Hangers and a Constant “Check Engine” Light[/mk_fancy_title]You have diligently supported your aging scale-out NAS environment, but it’s now getting increasingly expensive to maintain and grow. If you want to scale performance, you have to pay for additional capacity you don’t need – and performance no longer scales linearly with larger datasets. You end up spending more time managing the storage environment and less time on revenue-generating activities.

[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]The Junk Yard[/mk_fancy_title]Your archive shouldn’t be a place where old data goes to die. Perhaps you have a mixed bag of disk and tape, in a variety of formats, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult and costly to find and/or share what you need when you need it. You’re also fairly certain that just adding more capacity is not an effective archive solution. And as you look to the future of continued exponential unstructured data growth, the potential of your archive expanding beyond your office or even city borders, and the pressure to find new ways to monetize your archive, whatever deficiencies you have today, will only get worse.

[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]Walking the Lot[/mk_fancy_title]You’ve been talking to counterparts, walking the trade shows and reading online – and you realize there are more complete and cost-effective solutions that will benefit your organization today and tomorrow. You need to find a modern scale-out NAS solution that is comprehensive enough to balance between features, management, performance and cost – while also being flexible enough to grow with your business as requirements change. This new system should easily integrate into your existing workflows and environment – regardless of where your teams are physically located – with support for multiple client operating systems, multiple protocols and broad support for integrated 3rd party applications. And you need a platform that knows how to intelligently move less-active data to a shared archive that has integrated artificial intelligence designed to extract more business value from your archived content.

[mk_fancy_title tag_name=”h2″ style=”true” color=”#393836″ size=”14″ font_weight=”inhert” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”18″ font_family=”none” align=”left”]Xcellis Scale-out NAS[/mk_fancy_title]Xcellis® Scale-out NAS helps companies not only address the incessantly changing landscape of business priorities, prevailing technologies and new competitive threats, it also helps organizations ensure they have a storage platform that can cost-effectively scale both performance and capacity as the business dictates.

• Flexible Scaling with Maximum Performance: Scale up or out to maximize performance, capacity and cost. Up to 3x faster performance than competitive solutions.
• Unified Access and Management: Converged block and file, unified data view for access, multi-site and multi-cloud.
• Add Performance and Capacity Independently: Add drives or arrays to scale out capacity, add nodes to scale out client access performance. Add active object storage archive, deep tape archive or public cloud.
• Enterprise-Class Capabilities: Automated tiering, hybrid cloud, data protection and AI data enhancement.
• Support for All-IP Infrastructure: Xcellis Scale-out NAS stands alone in its ability to deliver the uncompromising performance and scalability – previously available only in a SAN – to all-IP infrastructures.

So, if you find yourself trying to squeeze 20 cubic feet of groceries into 5 cubic feet of trunk or cargo space, or having to blast the radio to drown out the symphony of clunking and grinding noises coming from your motor, it’s probably time for a new car. Likewise, if your scale-out NAS solution is struggling to get your company from point A to point B, give us a call.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]