You’ve been tasked with expanding your company’s data centre capabilities to keep up with rapidly growing storage demands. As more data is generated every day from various sources like customer databases, IoT devices, video files, and more, your existing storage infrastructure is struggling to efficiently manage and access all of this information. It’s time to modernise your approach with a high-performance storage server solution.
Storage servers can offer your data centre group a powerful way to consolidate and optimise your storage resources. With their flexible, scalable designs and advanced features, storage servers are well-equipped to handle even the most data-intensive workloads.
Let’s take a deep dive and explore the key ways that implementing a storage server system can supercharge your data centre.
Massive, Scalable Storage Capacity
Storage servers provide extraordinarily large and flexible storage capacities. With their ability to host dozens or even hundreds of hard drives, storage servers allow your data centre group to start with a large base capacity and non-disruptively scale out as more space is required. This helps future-proof your storage infrastructure for unpredictable data growth.
High-Performance Flash Storage
Flash storage delivers lightning-fast performance that can turbocharge your most input- and output-intensive workloads, like databases, data analytics, and video rendering. With storage servers’ ability to host multiple flash drives using NVMe or SAS interfaces, you gain access to flash’s astonishing speeds without having to completely redesign your storage architecture.
NVMe flash drives in particular are revolutionising storage performance, offering random read speeds up to 3 million IOPS and sub-microsecond latency that make traditional HDDs seem sluggish in comparison. This level of performance is essential for today’s real-time, flash-optimised applications. NVMe’s direct-to-memory design eliminates unnecessary CPU usage compared to SAS, further boosting throughput.
- Storage servers allow your data centre group to combine multiple NVMe drives using parallelization techniques for cumulative speed increases.
- You could dedicate an entire flash tier to your most demanding workloads while keeping other data on hybrid or capacity-optimised tiers. This tiering matches different data types to the optimal storage media.
- For large databases with random access patterns, NVMe Flash can cut response times from milliseconds to microseconds, radically improving user and application experiences.
- Within the flash tier, your data centre group also has the flexibility to use read and write caching intelligently. Write caches buffer write operations to flash before committing to disc, boosting write speeds 10x or more over HDDs.
- Read caches and prefetch frequently accessed data from discs into flash for nearly instantaneous retrieval later on.
- Caching algorithms learn access patterns over time to maximise read-hit rates.
- When combined with advanced data services, flash storage unleashes its full performance potential.
- Technologies like flash-aware deduplication and compression maximise usable flash capacity. Thin provisioning allows oversubscribing to physical storage.
- And quality-of-service controls let you reserve flash bandwidth for your highest-priority applications. By doing this, it is ensured that random workloads will not impede flash throughput.
With Flash, your databases and analytics can satisfy even extreme SLAs previously unattainable with HDDs alone. It gives your data centre group a serious competitive advantage in supporting performance-critical applications for years to come.
Advanced Data Protection
Storage servers implement robust RAID configurations and redundant components to safeguard your data. Features like hot-swappable drives, dual power supplies, cooling fans, and bad sector mapping protect against component failures. Many also support snapshots, replication, and erasure coding for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Increased Storage Density
By consolidating dozens of drives into a compact server chassis, storage servers maximise your data centre’s valuable rack space. This high-density design packs exabytes of storage capacity into just a few racks compared to other solutions. It allows you to store more data with less physical space and power.
Centralised Management
All of a storage server’s resources can be managed through a unified software console. This centralised management lets your data centre group easily provision and monitor storage from anywhere. Automated tasks like drive replacements are simplified. Remote management also reduces data centre visits and hands-on maintenance needs.
Powerful Processing Performance
Storage servers integrate powerful multi-core processors and ample memory to deliver fast inline deduplication, compression, encryption, and other data services without compromising storage throughput. This offloads processing demands from existing application servers for improved performance.
Flexible Connectivity
Storage servers support a variety of host connectivity options, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SAS, NVMe/FC, NVMe/TCP, and InfiniBand. They can integrate seamlessly into virtualized or non-virtualized environments. This connectivity flexibility future-proofs your infrastructure for emerging technologies.
Superior Data Services
Storage servers can run various data services, like thin provisioning, tiering, cloning, snapshots, replication, and encryption, without relying on external appliances. Services execute at wire speed to maximise storage performance without compromising features.
Cost-Effective Scalability
With scale-out modular designs, storage servers let your data centre group start small and incrementally expand capacity and throughput by adding additional servers and drives. This pay-as-you-grow model avoids forklift upgrades and keeps infrastructure costs predictable over the long term.
Increased Efficiency
By consolidating multiple servers worth of storage into dense, high-efficiency enclosures, storage servers reduce data centre space, power, and cooling requirements compared to other solutions. Their high storage density delivers significant green benefits and cost savings.
Investment Protection
Storage servers future-proof your data centre group storage investment by seamlessly integrating new technologies like all-flash configurations, denser multi-drive formats, and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) as standards evolve. Their modular designs also allow for the replacement of components without disrupting existing infrastructure.
Simplified Troubleshooting
If issues do arise, storage servers centralise hardware monitoring and alerting. Their modular designs also simplify isolating problems to specific components rather than complex storage fabrics. This streamlines troubleshooting, so you can quickly resolve incidents with less downtime.
Key Takeaways
Storage servers provide a scalable and cost-effective foundation for consolidating your organisation’s storage infrastructure. Their high-performance, feature-rich designs can supercharge your data centre’s capabilities to efficiently manage ever-growing data volumes for years to come. By modernising with a storage server solution, you set your data centre group up for continued success in supporting core business operations with reliable, optimised storage.