What You Should Know About Unified Storage
Unified storage is a solution to one of the most distracting problems in tech. How do you deal with a wide range of storage architectures and systems? Suppose an organization has numerous NAS setups alongside an iSCSI main server. Unifying this storage setup would radically reduce the number of headaches for both administrators and end users.
You might be understandably excited about the possibilities of unified storage. Before you make the leap, though, you should learn some basic things about the unified model.
How Unified Is It?
The goal of unified storage is to bring everything together. Imagine you have multiple protocols and architectures working together, such as a fiber channel alongside NFS in a SAN and on the cloud. On top of this functionality, unified storage also actively deduplicates redundant data. It can compress the data, too.
Even at the scale of a small business, this sort of unified structure can realize massive cost savings. The base cost of storage goes down because you don't have to deal with as many drives and networks. Likewise, you won't spend as much electricity keeping surplus data.
Increased Availability and Accessibility
Unified storage simplifies your architecture, too. Regardless of the size of your organization, you can achieve enterprise scale with greater ease. Even at a huge company with data located across continents, there's a unified solution. Data is more available because it also shows up in a single file system. Also, more devices can access the same data because of the unified setup.
Administrative Ease
Using unified storage allows you to easily impose a sensible administrative structure on your data. Access and availability are no longer about tracking down storage locations and then interfacing with the devices there. Instead, access and availability are entirely about what the administrators set at the top level. You don't have to worry about admins losing track of systems. If a system is on the network, it joins the unified storage structure.
A single dashboard unifies the system, too. If you need to see how much storage remains on the network to plan near-term upgrades, all you have to do is check the dashboard.
Scalability
The ease of subscribing new systems to the unified architecture makes this setup highly scalable. If you need to add resources, you don't need to engage in massive configurations. A network-wide install of file and operating systems will be sufficient to allow new devices to join the unified storage system. You can even add cloud instances to provide short-term scalability while you bring hardware online.
For more information, contact a company such as Nfina.