Storage capacity is becoming a real challenge for IT departments because the amount of data most companies use is growing exponentially. In addition, the increasing amount of production VMs requires more CPU and RAM resources. Choosing the right way to scale your IT storage infrastructure is vital to building a balanced, robust, and cost-effective production environment.
The scale-up process is one of the approaches to increasing the capacity, performance or compute resources of a system or server. Despite seeming simple, it presents a number of problems:
Updating individual systems with more CPU, RAM and disks has been a typical approach for the last two decades. However, when it is not available the alternative approaches should be chosen.
There are several issues to consider in scale up vs scale out. Scale-Out by StarWind Virtual SAN is an approach with modern virtualization in mind. It is a much more effective and cost-efficient alternative than scaling up. Scale-out aims to grow both storage and compute power by adding an additional upgrade node or nodes instead of disks, CPUs, NICs, or RAM to individual systems. Increasing the number of nodes increases infrastructure reliability by eliminating single points of failure. It also enables a more flexible computing environment by treating all servers as a unified compute and storage resource pool. Adding nodes with the same hardware configuration isn’t necessary. Customers can add performance-tuned or capacity-tuned StarWind nodes depending on their IT environment requirements.
Scale-up is still a great way to scale the environment, depending on the scenarios. Although both approaches have different goals in mind, it doesn’t mean that one is ultimately superior to another. Current infrastructure compilation, configuration, as well as business needs, have to be considered while choosing one approach over the other. Scale-up is more efficient in scenarios where clusters have CPU/RAM/disk slots available to add hardware. It is faster to get a small number of hardware elements for your cluster rather than waiting for a scale-out storage node or compute node to arrive. Thanks to their unmatched versatility and outstanding redundancy, adding hardware to your existing StarWind nodes is also a viable option to scale your IT environment.
Implementing the scale-out approach versus the scale-up one provides you with a robust, well-balanced, and easily scalable configuration. The scale-out approach gives IT administrators the following significant advantages:
There are still cases where a scale-up approach is still a suitable option for increasing the amount of available CPU/RAM/storage resources in the virtualization cluster. Our engineering team is helping our clients to identify the best suitable approach. Contact our team here to get help.
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We are satisfied with StarWind. The support is really fantastic. Whenever any issue arises, the response is very prompt, and solution is immediate.
We were able to build 2-node storage clusters based on virtualization in 19 hypermarkets without any problems and with high cost-efficiency.
By being able to virtualize our environment with StarWind, we were able to retire some old hardware, get our services highly available, reduce power consumption and heat in our server closet.
StarWind got us off the clustered environment, which was a big help. So, I could regain control of my storage and reclaim and redistribute the space we desperately needed.
Price + Simplicity. StarWind vSAN offers great pricing and allows us to get work done without expensive custom hardware. It also makes getting back online quick and easy after an outage or hardware failure.
We chose StarWind Mainly because of the cost compared to other vendors. Simplicity of setup was also a major factor and I like the fact that you don’t need a vendor certified engineer to perform the installation.
Because of recommendations of older colleagues, with StarWind, we got a reliable storage with no additional hardware. There was a need to increase IT infrastructure performance and we saw StarWind as the most cost-effective solution.
StarWind is the best storage product I have ever used! It satisfies and exceeds requirements.
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