“The cost effective nature of NAS storage makes it a preferred choice among enterprises.” Said Technavio’s lead analyst Rakesh Kumar
Storage drives and storage technology is evolving day by day,
similarly the capability of enterprise Network Attached Storage (NAS) for
storing data is increasing proportionally. Businesses are always searching for
optimized storage solutions. Choosing the right kind of enterprise NAS storage is
important for managing enterprise-grade workloads.
SMEs, SMBs, and large organizations can leverage enterprise
NAS storage technology for a variety of use-cases and applications. When it
comes to choosing the NAS most suited for your business, it may be a bit difficult
to pick the right kind of NAS storage without proper guidance.
Consider these questions when choosing an enterprise NAS
storage for your business:
Ø
How much storage capacity is needed?
It may sound simple but this question warrants a great deal of preparation and forecasting. Do it wrong and your business ends up with fat provisioned storage resources that consume space, resources, and add no immediate value. Do it right and you get exactly what your business needs; immediately adding value and using resources affectively.
In terms of
forecasting storage capacity, file-level storage or NAS storage is ideal
because of its scalability. The ability to scale file-level infrastructure enables
businesses to setup storage as per their immediate requirements and they can
scale when their storage requirements grow.
A thing to note here is that the ability to scale depends on the vendor and the NAS storage technology. For instance, StoneFly offers a NAS storage solution that can scale into petabytes and they can set it up as a redundant appliance too; giving users the ability to dually scale (performance + storage capacity) their storage infrastructure.
How “flexible” is the enterprise NAS storage
Enterprise NAS storage can be called “flexible” if it can adapt and accommodate in accordance to businesses’ requirements. Here’s a brief list of what a good enterprise NAS storage solution should offer as a standard:
- Compatibility with mainstream servers and software.
- Built-in cloud connect and support for enterprise clouds like Azure cloud storage, AWS cloud, and others.
- Configurable as an All-Flash, Hybrid (SSD/Flash + SAS/Hard drives), and pure SAS/hard drive NAS.
- Should support High Availability (HA) configuration and multi-path connections.
- Should offer data services such as erasure coding, snapshots, replication, and encryption.
- Should have a modular, redundant, and hot-swappable architecture.
You might be thinking, that’s a big list. Are there really any enterprise NAS storage solutions out there that provide all of these desired features? Well yes, StoneFly SSO™ NAS delivers these and more.
Conclusion
In the end, every business has their own set of
requirements. That’s why what works for most may not work for your business. It
is very important to first analyze and understand what your business needs when
it comes to data storage. And then begin the search for the ideal enterprise
NAS storage.
However, regardless of the industry and the use-case, there
are some attributes that should be a part of an enterprise-level NAS storage
solution. A NAS appliance has to be flexible enough so that it’s future-proof
and has the ability to scale as the business data grows. It has to be reliable
so that in the event of hardware failure, the business doesn’t have to endure
data loss.
These two are the most important attributes of an ideal enterprise
NAS storage solution and a must-have for all businesses.
