Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!
Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays
It is amazing that something as simple-sounding as making an array get bigger can be so complex, yet scaling storage is notoriously difficult. Our storage protocols just weren’t designed with scaling in mind, and they lack the flexibility needed to dynamically address multiple nodes. So my hat is off to these companies and others who have come up with clever ways to maintain compatibility while scaling out beyond the bounds of a single storage array.
Scale-Out Storage Field Day?
Having wrapped up Storage Field Day 4 this week, it seems that the theme was scaling storage. Delegates learned about scale-out storage from CloudByte, Coho Data, Nimble Storage, Overland Storage, Avere Systems, Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe.