What makes stonefly nas storage appliances best for the enterprise
Before we dive deeper into the features of Stonefly’s Super Scale Out (SSO™) NAS appliances and understanding what makes them the best out there. Let’s first revise our understanding of what scale-out network attached storage (NAS) is.
What is Scale Out NAS?
Theoretically, scale out NAS is a distributed file system (DFS) with a storage space that can be scaled up infinitely while handling thousands of clients. It is capable of handling files, blocks, objects and big data. Basically, it functions as a distributed data overlay; it polls together storage building over Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). These attributes allows it to aggregate disk resources and manage data in a single global namespace.
A more unsophisticated explanation of scale-out NAS is that it is a server that stores data. This data is accessible for clients over a network. And, its storage space can be expanded as much as the user desires with the addition of specific hardware.
Now that we’ve revised our concepts of NAS storage and scale-out NAS storage, let’s discuss the features of Stonefly’s SSO™ and what makes it the best option for clients needing a large, secure and reliable NAS appliance.
What makes SSO™ NAS appliance so great?
The Stonefly SSO™ NAS appliances support multiple nodes. It can be scaled up to a total of 90 drives and 1080 TeraBytes (over 1 PetaByte) storage space per chassis. It supports up to 12 PB per managed rack and is scalable to unlimited nodes as per the user’s requirements.
Each node is capable of handling any request at any time. The NAS appliance does this by hashing the Read/Write request to calculate the file location across all nodes. With the calculated answer the scale out NAS avoids metadata corruption and bottleneck. This enables it to handle a huge range of data without affecting the performance and permitting infinite scalability.
The NAS appliance comes with data transportability feature, which enables the user to import and export data between their on-premise data center and the cloud NAS storage for ease of offsite data mobility, backup and restore. Storage devices utilize machine learning and heuristic analysis to automatically connect and disconnect from the system, if any suspicious data (such as malware detection) activity is detected.
The SSO™ NAS appliances come with a No-Metadata feature. Metadata is a type of data that contains information about other data. Having no-metadata there is no addition or ‘unwanted’ data, so the appliance ensure that the purchased storage space is used efficiently. There are other mentionable features also included in the NAS appliance like: Read ahead, Write behind, Asynchronous Input and output (I/O), Intelligent I/O, and Aggregated Operations. The SSO™ NAS appliances also employs a distributed file system. Data is distributed among several nodes where users can access the data without the need to find out the file location. So it ensures high availability and a speedy ‘fetch’ of data without making the user get the feeling that it’s a remotely accessed data.
More features
Besides the above mentioned features, the NAS appliance employs several other customer oriented features to cement its place at the very top of storage solution providers. For instance in terms of compatibility it supports all standard X font server (XFS) file format of standard operating systems. The NAS storage is capable of exceeding aggregate read and write speed in most cases with file sizes at full network bandwidth of up to 3GegaBytes/second per node. The NAS appliance also supports auto re-balance, allowing a distributed volume over a single segment. There’s also automated tiering, self-heal, protocol support, Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), Geo-replication, Cloud Cache, Snapshot, Encryption and more.
Simply put, Stonefly’s SSO™ NAS appliances ensure high availability of data, provide unlimited storage space, protects the data, creates replicas over the data archiving solutions ensuring even more security, efficiently utilizes the storage space, and is compatible with mainstream products thus also reducing the cost of the user. It is simple, efficient, safe and also inexpensive; The best possible NAS cloud storage solution you can ever have.