With traditional NAS, controller upgrades are part of the typical lifecycle of the system. At the time of the initial purchase, the controllers are selected to deliver on the performance requirements at that time but not much more since that would mean spending more money. A year or two down the road, the controllers are out of gas and something must be done to get more performance for the data.
At this point controller upgrades are the typical course of action. Controller upgrades are so common that people have become numb to the pain. Let me remind people of the problems that come with this and propose a better way.
Controller upgrades with a traditional NAS system involve the following steps:
1. Purchase higher performance controllers (typically a model or two up the traditional NAS vendor’s product line, if a higher model exists)
2. Purchase new disk shelves or Flash-based PCI cards, required to get more performance out of the new controllers
3. Purchase new licenses for all software (e.g. NFS, CIFS, mirroring) at the higher price tier of the new controllers
4. Take the original NAS system offline
5. Remove the old controllers
6. Install the new controllers
7. Add the new disk shelves
8. Bring the upgraded system back online
The above process is expensive, disruptive, and requires more disks, power, and space even if no additional storage capacity is required. As an alternative, consider boosting the performance of your existing NAS with Avere FXT appliances.
Avere FXT appliances boost the performance of all NAS applications by accelerating read, write, and metadata operations without the need to add more disks to your NAS system. FXT appliances scale from 1 to 25 nodes per cluster to match your initial needs and gracefully scale as your needs grow. If more capacity is needed, then this can be accomplished by adding cost-effective SATA drives to your existing NAS system. FXT appliances are simple to install in existing environments and require no changes to existing applications, clients, NAS systems, or data retention procedure such as backup and mirroring. FXT appliances accelerate NAS performance and enable a 5:1 reduction in disks, power, and space when compared to traditional NAS.
With Avere you get the benefits of a clustered storage solution today without the need to migrate your data to a new storage system. For more information on FXT appliances, please visit the Avere website product page.
