White paper Title:

The Economics of Scale-Out Storage

Company Name: Red Hat

Abstract:

Scale-out storage technologies have rapidly gained popularity over the past several years, successfully crossing the chasm from niche technology to mainstream enterprise solution. As this shift occurs, an increasing number of enterprises are seeking to understand the advantages of the newer technology when it comes to the storage of exploding amounts of unstructured data.

While many sources have investigated the advantages of scale-out storage from a technology perspective, few have taken on this challenge with a focus on economics. This is unfortunate, as a key environmental factor shaping storage decisions today is the turbulent global economy. With recession just behind us, and growth stalled in many sectors, IT executives continue to be asked to do even more with even fewer resources.

Exploring the economic advantages of scale-out storage is the focus of this paper. After briefly defining scale-out storage we discuss, in turn, the capital, operational and strategic advantages of scale-out storage solutions.

Because the decision to adopt scale-out storage is most often made in light of the traditional NAS solutions already deployed within the enterprise, we focus on the relative merits of these two technologies throughout our analysis. We conclude that the attention currently garnered by scale-out storage is not misplaced, as it offers significant economic advantages relative to traditional NAS technologies.

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