Scalability: Scale-Out

Supports both vertical and horizontal scaling, providing flexible options for expanding resources when needed.

Intro 

Nowadays, the amount of data that businesses accommodate and use is growing exponentially. Also, in most cases, the production workload is not static, meaning that businesses, most likely, deploy new applications to improve the current environment and drive business growth. Therefore, more CPU and RAM resources are needed. Most solutions on the market are scalable, but how to understand the best approach in your case? 

Problem 

Every approach has its own limitations, whether it be hardware or software limitations. The Scale-Up approach allows you to vertically scale storage, compute or networking capacity independently on single/multiple servers. However, the Scale-Up approach is limited by the hardware on which cluster is running. 

Solution 

When physical limitations of the hardware are reached, Scale-Out might be the best option to further scale your clustered environment. 

Scale-Out allows you to scale horizontally by adding more nodes to the cluster up to a limitation of the hypervisor clustering engine. StarWind High Availability clusters support classic Scale-Out when you add a fully functional member of the cluster (with Storage, Compute, and Networking) and flexible Scale-Out when a newly added node can serve only storage or only compute. 

Conclusion 

StarWind VSAN gives you freedom of choice about how exactly you want to scale your system by being able to support both Scale-Up and Scale-Out. By the end of the day, it is your system and your choice of how exactly you want it to serve you and your business.