In enterprise storage, scalability is the key to cutting costs. A highly scalable storage platform simplifies management by accommodating growth without the need to create, pay for and maintain new silos of storage. Given this mindset, it’s ironic that scalability is not a strong point in today’s enterprise NAS platforms. Devices that were touted as highly scalable ten years ago have now evolved into expensive, labour-intensive systems as they’re multiplied to meet rapidly expanding requirements.

To address this costly situation, an increasing number of NAS vendors are offering new NAS products that integrate powerful storage management technologies. By enhancing scalability – often by many orders of magnitude -- these advancements allow IT staff members to effectively administer and protect far more data, with less ongoing disruption to users, than was ever possible before.

NAS proliferation can be triggered when one of two limits is encountered. The first is capacity. All devices have a hard stop beyond which they cannot grow, and practical limits may be exceeded before that hard limit is reached. When you factor in requirements for snapshots and management, most devices will not grow beyond 70% of their rated terabytes.

The second limit is performance. File delivery consumes processor power, and processors can become a bottleneck that increases response times and decreases user satisfaction. Performance limits are just as real as capacity limits, and they can be harder to anticipate since performance requirements are notoriously difficult to predict. Because most NAS devices tie processors to specific storage space, resolving a processor bottleneck creates the same annoyance as resolving a capacity limit: user and data migration.

An ideal NAS solution would address both capacity and performance scaling with the flexibility to add processor power and space as needed—on demand, and without limits. And ideally this change could be accommodated in the middle of the work day with zero system downtime. Finally, the perfect solution would start at an affordable price point and grow continuously to enterprise-scale as needs expand. While this sounds like a tall order, these objectives are precisely what next-generation scalable NAS solutions are intended to achieve.

Scalable NAS refers to a new generation of file-based storage solutions that comprise not one solution but a variety of approaches addressing the need for seamless file storage growth. The starting point for all of them is virtualisation. On one hand, it’s true that as a standalone product, storage virtualisation has a chequered history, rife with bloated promises and inconsistent execution.

But outside of the storage world, virtualisation thrives. VMware, for example, is a highly successful server virtualisation solution that allows virtual servers to reside within a cluster of general-purpose servers. Each of the virtual servers exists as an application environment that can be moved among different physical servers to scale processing power and provide failover. This allows users to provision these resources when needed. Storage systems can benefit from the same type of virtualisation to escape bandwidth limitations.
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Conclusion
Virtualisation has been around since IBM mainframes ruled the data processing world, but we have yet to fully realise its promise in the storage world. This situation is changing as a small group of advanced vendors are applying the technology to scalable NAS file services environments that enable users to dramatically consolidate their server populations on NAS gateways while realising reduced complexity, enhanced manageability and unprecedented flexibility.

This technologically elegant solution has the additional virtue of being financially alluring. Depending on individual user requirements, the combination of scaleable NAS Gateways and open storage strategies can save users huge amounts of money while cost-efficiently reshaping their IT infrastructures