{"id":2595,"date":"2011-12-02T07:00:29","date_gmt":"2011-12-02T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=2595"},"modified":"2011-12-02T07:00:29","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T15:00:29","slug":"storage-in-scale-up-versus-scale-out-wars-scale-out-has-momentum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/storage-in-scale-up-versus-scale-out-wars-scale-out-has-momentum\/","title":{"rendered":"Storage: In Scale-up Versus Scale-out Wars, Scale-out has Momentum"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent article on GigaOm compared the storage strategies being promoted by HP and Oracle. \u00a0The article by Barb Darrow<\/a>, senior writer at GigaOm,\u00a0 commented that the difference between the two approaches was a perfect example of “a classic scale-up vs. scale-out battle” of storage strategies. \u00a0What exactly did she mean by that?<\/p>\n

Scale-out, <\/em>sometimes also called\u00a0horizontal scaling<\/em>, <\/em> refers to expanding system capacity by adding more hardware units or nodes. \u00a0Scale-out strategies often try to expand capacity by combining large numbers of cheap commodity hardware units. \u00a0For example, hundreds of low-end commodity computers could be combined into a cluster which provides computing power which equals or exceeds that of a single supercomputer. \u00a0The techniques relies on the availability of very fast interconnected communication between the individual nodes.<\/p>\n

Scale-up<\/em>, sometimes also called vertical scaling<\/em>, \u00a0refers to expanding system capacity by bulking up the resources of a single node or machine. \u00a0It might involve adding more RAM or CPUs to increase performance. \u00a0Or more commonly, it would mean upgrading the entire hardware unit on a node with a new upgraded and more performant piece of hardware.<\/p>\n

Scale-up strategies tend to be simple, while scale-out ones are often complex. \u00a0Although new scale-out technologies are trying to close that gap.<\/p>\n

A big disadvantage of scale-out, for example, \u00a0is that as more nodes are added to a system, management of the many nodes can become very complex and there is a potential for throughput and latency issues. \u00a0Often programs or applications also need to be re-written or re-structured to take full advantage of the scale-out architecture. \u00a0On the other hand, the big advantage of scale-out typically is the cost — it tends to be a significantly more cost effective approach.<\/p>\n

Storage is one area where scale-out architectures are being increasingly applied. \u00a0This trend is being driven by challenges IT shops are faced with in managing rapidly growing amounts of data. \u00a0Large organizations are increasingly going down the path of scale-out, adopting network-attached storage (NAS<\/a>)\u00a0systems, an approach that allows them to fairly easily scale to multi-petabytes of \u00a0data. \u00a0Smaller companies are testing elastically scalable cloud-based storage solutions, most of which are implemented with scale-out storage technologies.<\/p>\n

In commenting about scale-out NAS <\/a>(network-attached storage) storage technology, Terri McClure<\/a>, a senor analyst at ESG, said that<\/a> “scale-out NAS really started in niche markets roughly a decade ago, so it’s certainly not brand new. These systems typically excelled in handling high-throughput applications such as media, entertainment, geospatial imaging or bioinformatics applications, and that’s because of the bandwidth they can provide. But what is new is that we’ve seen a class of products emerge that fits the more file I\/O-intensive performance requirements typical of enterprise IT shops.”<\/p>\n

But new NAS scale-out technology can not be considered fully baked just yet. \u00a0Unlike more mature scale-up storage technologies, scale-out technology doesn’t yet have the same wide range of existing add-on products for handling operations like snapshots, one-to-many and many-to-one replication, remote replication and remote snapshots, thin provisioning, deduplication and compression. \u00a0Although it is likely only a matter of time.<\/p>\n

Arun Taneja<\/a>, founder and consulting analyst at Taneja Group in Hopkinton, Mass, said that there is a current limit to NAS scalability. \u00a0He said that “you can put them [more storage units] together and they\u2019ll work. But you will have a declining performance curve. \u00a0The curve will be pretty linear for a while, and then at some point in time, it\u2019ll start flattening and, further out, it\u2019s going to actually start going down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A recent article on GigaOm compared the storage strategies being promoted by HP and Oracle. \u00a0The article by Barb Darrow, senior writer at GigaOm,\u00a0 commented that the difference between the two approaches was a perfect example of “a classic scale-up…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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