As your data center expands to handle increasing data volumes and workloads, you likely find yourself needing more storage capacity and performance to meet demands. However, simply adding more standalone storage units can become costly, unmanageable, and inefficient over time.
What if there was a smarter way to scale your data center infrastructure that provided greater flexibility, utilization, and cost savings? The answer is to adopt integrated storage server solutions.
In this blog post, we’ll explore 8 compelling reasons why you need to incorporate storage server products into every growing data processing center.
1. Maximize Density and Space Utilization
Your data center’s floor space is a valuable resource that’s constantly under pressure as your IT infrastructure grows. Traditional storage arrays take up a lot of real estate with their large chassis and power supplies.
But with storage servers, you can consolidate multiple drives into a compact 2U or 4U form factor and deploy them as rackmount servers. This allows you to triple or quadruple your storage density compared to standalone disk shelves. So you gain much more effective utilization of your existing data processing center footprint.
2. Simplify Management with a Server-Style Approach
With individual disk shelves, you end up with lots of discrete devices from different vendors to procure, deploy, configure, update, and maintain. This results in a management nightmare. However, storage servers virtualize all their internal disks into a single volume or file system that can be managed just like any other server.
This means you can leverage your existing server product administration skills, tools, and workflows to look after your entire pooled storage infrastructure from a central console. Remote monitoring, firmware upgrades, and troubleshooting are all simplified.
3. Improve Performance with Scale-Out Architecture
Traditional storage is scale-up, where you add more processors and cache to an existing controller to boost IOPS. This is costly and complex. Alternatively, scale-out storage servers allow you to easily expand performance by adding additional nodes to a cluster.
- Storage servers utilize a scale-out architecture where you can add additional nodes to a cluster over time.
- Each node contains multiple disks and has its own CPU, memory and network connection.
- The nodes work together in a cluster to act as a single storage pool.
- Data is intelligently distributed across the nodes using data distribution techniques like erasure coding or replication.
- This allows the cluster to scale both capacity and performance linearly by adding more nodes.
- As nodes are added, the cluster can distribute more workload threads for tasks like data processing.
- You also gain more parallelism as data and metadata operations can execute simultaneously on different nodes.
- The cumulative disk throughput and IOPS available to applications increase with every new node.
- The cluster maintains high performance even as it scales to thousands of disks across many nodes.
- Individual node failures have minimal impact as the cluster redistributes data to keep running.
- Scale-out also provides better investment protection than scale-up, as you add nodes non-disruptively.
- You avoid costly forklift upgrades of entire arrays, which disrupt service and waste existing hardware.
Overall, this architecture ensures storage performance grows right along with your data center service capacity and workload demands. It allows your storage to seamlessly scale on-demand without performance degradation, even as petabytes of data are added.
4. Boost Efficiency with Server-Class Hardware
Storage servers leverage the latest server-class processors, memory, and networking. This lets you take advantage of ongoing innovation in these components to continually improve storage efficiency. For example, high-core-count CPUs optimize data processing and caching.
Generous RAM acts as a big, fast buffer. Plus, high-speed networking enables faster data transfers both within the cluster and to applications. All this translates to better performance and utilization compared to aging controller hardware inside traditional storage.
5. Reduce Costs with Commodity Components
With storage servers, you benefit from economies of scale in the server industry. They utilize affordable off-the-shelf server parts like Intel Xeon CPUs and standard DDR4 memory, which benefit from intense market competition and innovation.
This drives down your storage TCO significantly compared to proprietary controller-based arrays. You also have more flexibility to choose components that suit your unique performance and budget needs. And swapping parts is far simpler than for integrated controllers.
6. Improve Reliability with Modular Design
Storage servers adopt a modular, distributed architecture, which delivers high availability through redundancy. Since they don’t rely on a single controller, you avoid the risk of downtime if that component fails. Instead, the workload automatically shifts to other server nodes.
You also get protection against multiple simultaneous drive failures through erasure coding. Plus, field-replaceable server product components mean fast repairs and no lengthy controller replacements if maintenance is needed. This all adds up to better uptime guarantees for your business-critical storage.
7. Simplify Scaling with Pay-As-You-Grow Flexibility
With traditional storage, you have to carefully predict your capacity and performance requirements for 3–5 years upfront due to inflexible scaling. But storage servers offer a true pay-as-you-grow model.
You can start small with a few nodes and non-disruptively add capacity and throughput by deploying additional servers without forklift upgrades. This flexibility saves you money by letting procurement match actual usage. It also avoids over-provisioning and reduces risks from inaccurate long-term forecasts.
8. Improve Resource Utilization with Server Virtualization
Storage servers support advanced virtualization features like thin provisioning, tiering, and cloning, which maximize the utilization of physical capacity. For instance, thin provisioning allocates storage on-demand for your data center systems, avoiding wasted space.
Tiering intelligently moves data between fast SSDs and high-capacity HDDs. And space-efficient cloning creates production environments quickly. These features ensure your storage investment is squeezed for every last byte of value. Server virtualization also enables new use cases like file and object storage.
Final Words
Integrated storage server solutions provide a smarter, more flexible and more cost-effective approach for scaling data center storage compared to standalone disk shelves and traditional arrays. Their innovative server-style design delivers significant advantages in density, management simplicity, performance, efficiency, availability, scalability and resource utilization. If you want to optimize your storage infrastructure to keep pace with data growth, now is the time to evaluate and adopt storage server products.