If you’re at all concerned with the scalability of your infrastructure when considering upgrades, you should know that adding new filers, more high speed drives and/or Flash modules to a NAS installation to improve performance is a short-term solution at best. It’s only a matter of time before application demands once again outstrip the NAS infrastructure’s ability to scale performance and you’re back to ripping out old gear and replacing it with new. In contrast, with Avere’s two stage NAS architecture, system scalability is built in. As more clients and new applications are added to the mix (requiring higher IOPS performance) an Avere FXT cluster can be easily expanded with the non-intrusive addition of new nodes. Up to 25 appliances can be added to a cluster, delivering plenty of horsepower without having to touch any other devices already in place. And because the Avere FXT cluster can serve multiple storage servers, there is no need to add Flash to each and every filer – the Avere cluster becomes an extensible fast media layer in front of all of them, serving up performance to hot spots without over provisioning.
Manageability is another hidden cost to upgrading an existing NAS infrastructure. With falling prices and improved durability making new storage media such as Flash SSDs widely available to boost application performance, many companies are tempted to install Flash at tier zero and expect that it will solve their performance problems, albeit it at a relatively high cost. But installing fast-access storage media solves only part of the problem. IT then has to figure out which applications are best served by the new tier of storage, often having to become an expert in the latest storage media read and write rates and application QoS schemes in order to optimize the utilization of the more costly storage media. In comparison, an Avere FXT cluster has the intelligence to dynamically allocate data to the appropriate storage tier and media based upon both data and access characteristics, which balances the cost/performance equation with no administrative overhead.
