Network Attached Storage

More than half of European enterprises are concerned about storage bottlenecks in virtualized systems, according to an independent survey conducted by DataCentre Solutions and commissioned by network attached storage provider Avere Systems.

The upcoming VMwolrd Europe will see storage challenges as the hot topics of discussion, according to Avere Systems.

The survey shows that as data storage systems grow, the load placed on standard networked systems is heading for overload and the subsequent slowdown affects business efficiency.

The European NAS Audit 2012 revealed 77 percent of organizations had applications that required high performance from storage networks. While 27 percent business use pure network attached storage (NAS), a further 49 percent have NAS running in tandem with storage attached networks (SAN).

The fact that over 51 percent of survey participants access over access over 50TB of data and just under half of these have amassed over 500TB indicate the enormity of this problem.

Virtualization offers a cost-effective solution as concentration of numerous applications on a single server saves on hardware costs, but it also results contention of storage resources.

The top five solutions to meet data access challenge, as revealed by the survey participants are: updating the NAS controllers [28 percent], buying more hard disks [26 percent], adding solid state drive arrays (SSDs) [26 percent], switching to Fibre Channel networks [23 percent], and 21 percent considering NAS optimization technologies.

Bigger NAS controllers and huge disk shelves, however, are based on aging product architectures designed for the past, so they translate into costly piles of gear for customers that now consume vast amounts of data centre space, according to Avere Systems.

 A better, more efficient approach, according to Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing, Avere Systems, is to deploy an optimized edge-core storage architecture designed for modern applications such as virtualization and big data that keeps active data closest to the users on edge filers filled with fast storage media. “The less active data is kept on dense storage media on core filers that takes up a fraction of the space and energy of older devices.”