Growth and management of unstructured data continues to present major challenges for IT. In a recent survey of more than 400 IT professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing and/or managing data storage technology, the rapid growth and management of unstructured data was cited most often, 40 percent of the time, as one of the top storage challenges they are facing.

Unstructured data is growing faster than ever thanks to the proliferation of endpoint devices that can capture data as well as richer file formats and the resulting larger data sets. Imaging, eLearning, cloud services and video surveillance are big unstructured data growth areas. The midrange NAS market is lagging behind the improvement of easily managed file storage environments; midrange file sharing is still largely the origin of scale-up storage silos.

With the explosion of data and the importance of compliance and uptime; traditional scale-up network attached storage (NAS) solutions are quickly reaching limits of capacity, redundancy and performance within dynamic IT storage environments.

Scale-out NAS systems can independently scale throughput and capacity by adding nodes that work in parallel to support throughput requirements, yet are managed within a single namespace as a single system image, maintaining a single system image as new storage nodes (processor or capacity). This allows users to create a massively scalable shared storage pool and drives storage efficiency. NAS allows businesses to store and retrieve large amounts of data at a much more affordable rate than ever before.

NAS systems can store any data that is in the form of files, and more or less parallel the uses of a traditional file server.  NAS systems are best known for their reliable operation and ease of administration, and many include built-in features like secure authentication, disk space quotas and automatic e-mail alerts when errors are detected.

Overland Storage (News - Alert) SnapScale X2 represents the latest entry into the scale-out NAS market. It is an “infinitely scalable,” high-performance and availability scale-out NAS system all wrapped up in a global namespace for ease of use.

The SnapScale X2 is a clustered NAS solution that solves the problems of traditional storage by enabling organizations with rapid or unpredictable data growth to scale capacity and performance infinitely without adding management complexity. It eliminates islands of storage, enabling easy and affordable scaling without having to predict capacity in advance.

By investing in the SnapScale architecture upfront, smaller organizations can assure that their file serving infrastructure will grow to meet future needs painlessly and cost-effectively, regardless of how rapidly performance and capacity requirements increase over time.

To learn more about NAS storage and SnapScale X2, join XS International’s webinar on Wednesday, Dec. 5 at 11 a.m./12 p.m. EST. Register now!

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