How often do you get downtime? Is it difficult for you to manage and prioritize data? Is it cluttered all over? These problems are extremely common when you are using traditional storage solutions. Enterprise NAS storage eliminates downtime, makes data management easy and provides redundant storage to increase data availability and ensure business continuity. Here are some of the benefits of using Network Attached Storage for massive data centers.
RAID redundancy offers high data availability
NAS storage drives are connected in different levels of RAID depending upon the storage configuration. RAID ensures that data is available at all times, even if one or even multiple drives fail at a time (which is very rare). The best RAID configuration depends on your storage requirements and how much storage space you are willing to sacrifice for redundancy. Most huge data centers follow a 50-50 storage to redundancy ratio to provide the highest level of redundancy. It does cost you storage, but in case of a serious drive failure, you can be sure that your data is available at all times.
Encryption ensures high security.
Most of the enterprise NAS vendors employ some level encryption in their Network Attached Storage devices. StoneFly, for instance, use AES 256-bit encryption which is military-grade encryption that is almost impossible to break.
Encryption ensures that only the person who has the right key to the data can access it. This makes your data transfers highly secure and away from the prying eyes. It is a good protection against ransomware attacks. Even if your data somehow gets into the wrong hands, you can be sure that nobody will be able to access it.
NAS storage offers network aggregation that can increase performance
The best NAS systems can have multiple connection links that provide traffic failover and increase your overall bandwidth. Although it may require significantly more processing power, but if you have a clustered scale-out NAS storage system, that is not a problem.
Easy to maintain in a data center
Scale-out storage is not affected by maintenance or repair. It is very rare to have an all-out outage in a clustered system except in case of disasters. Adding or replacing storage in a NAS storage device is just as easy as hot-swapping the drives, and you are all good to go. Furthermore, scale-out systems work in unison, and all the storage is connected and accessed through a global namespace. Users can access all the storage capacity as one drive connected to the network. No needless downtimes and no silos.
Bottom Line
Data is the life and blood of almost every business. NAS solution is an extremely viable choice of storage for data centers, especially for businesses that rely on data 24/7. NAS storage should be your preferred storage choice if you want to ensure data availability, data security, and ease your data management.
