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As your storage needs grow, considerations such as efficiency, cost, and reliability will determine whether a scale-out or scale-up approach is the best architecture for your needs.
The rise of cloud-based storage has changed the way businesses of all sizes and industries view scale. The language around storage architecture may be complex, but the process itself must be simple. No matter what industry you’re in, as you grow, your team will have more and more conversations about how to scale operations for growth without incurring excessive costs or losing performance. Whether you’re relying on cloud-based storage or enterprise data centers, your data must be secure, reliable, and available.
According to a recent study, more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems by 2022. If you are currently utilizing a scale-up model, does this mean you should alter your approach? In this article, we will dive into scalability, define and compare scale-up and scale-out strategies, and touch on how to find products and services that will meet your needs in 2020.
What is scalability?
Scalability is an important consideration when determining or reevaluating storage needs. As any technology-driven operation grows, the infrastructure and storage that supports that operation must grow too. Scalability refers to the precise way that infrastructure evolves to adjust for growth. A scalable architecture can accommodate the workload of additional servers on a network and offer more storage space for data.
When discussing scalability, the terms “vertical scaling” and “horizontal scaling” are important. They refer to concepts that you are already likely familiar with: scale-up and scale-out. Vertical scaling is to scale up; horizontal scaling is to scale out.
What it means to scale-up
The scale-up model may be the most familiar one. Scaling up, or vertical scaling, refers to adding more storage hardware, generally another shelf of disks, to an existing dual-controller storage array. You may upgrade the controller with more RAM or other resources during a scale-up as well, but you are essentially upgrading one processing point to support the new storage infrastructure. The controller has total visibility into all the disks in its storage architecture, which can be used to enable features that improve overall system performance.
As your need for data resources increases, scaling up requires that you accommodate growth by upgrading the existing controller, which can lead to inefficiencies as the storage expands. At some point, a growing data center will need additional storage arrays, and a network of arrays is significantly more complex to manage and access.
This is the tried and true way to build a data center, but it relies on more powerful hardware and comes with more complicated management needs.
What it means to scale-out
Scale-out storage architecture, or horizontal scaling, is designed to address performance and capacity simultaneously by leveraging the principals of distributed computing. This storage approach spreads the workload across a network of controller nodes, each managing its own set of disks. These nodes do not have complete visibility into data on the other nodes, but together they provide a dynamic pool of data resources that can be used to achieve performance equal to or exceeding the most powerful scale-up architectures.
Rather than rely on upgrading hardware to scale, scale-out architecture simply adds more nodes. While each individual node may not have the power to enable some of the features of scale-up arrays, the combined power of many smaller nodes provides flexibility and scalability that is hard to match with scale-up methods.
Why scale-out is the best approach
Scale-up is increasingly viewed as an outdated approach to storage architecture. The downsides are clear: Data centers that rely on vertical scaling run the risks of over-purchasing on hardware, scaling into performance issues, and increasing service disruptions. Thus, scale-up architecture can have a negative effect on your operating costs and degrade performance over time.
Scale-out architecture is rapidly becoming the new standard for storage systems. A scale-out storage strategy requires lower initial investment and is designed to evolve and grow easily as needs change. The investment in hardware is also lower. While some experts may still choose scale-up architectures to overcome node-level performance issues for certain applications, scale-out is the approach cloud-based storage providers rely on to accommodate their customers’ shifting storage needs without wasting disk space and money.
Cloud-based storage considerations
When considering cloud-based storage options, scalability is everything. Your storage architecture is critical and tied to performance, usability, quality, and bandwidth. When seeking services and products, you must choose a provider who understands the importance of a scale-out model in relation to cybersecurity, reliability and creating a structure that supports different networks and offers. That’s where Unisol can help.
Partnering with Unisol
Unisol is an international technology company that offers networking solutions and know-how for customers in a variety of fields, including audio/video production, electronic security, and telecommunication.
We sell worldwide and are compliant with all international trade regulations. So, whether you are in the US or on the other side of the world, our logistics and installation support combined with our wide catalog of products makes it possible to find the right solution for your networking needs. Our top products include security cameras, networking equipment, and servers and storage systems, and our expert staff will help you understand the best way to deploy a scale-out storage architecture. Contact Unisol to get a quote on project design, professional services, and more.
