DCIG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the DCIG TOP 5 Enterprise Cloud-based NAS Consolidation Solutions report. This report provides guidance on TOP 5 solutions organizations should consider for cloud-based NAS consolidation.
Background: The Expanding Volumes of Unstructured Data
Many enterprises struggle with managing expanding volumes of unstructured data throughout the organization. Storing, protecting, and securing this data creates challenges around cost, complexity, and scalability. Addressing these issues take cycles away from other important IT projects bringing innovation and future profits. A new generation of software-defined storage (SDS) offers solutions to these challenges.
Background: The Difficulties Created by Unstructured Data Growth
Unstructured data growth is filling the enterprise data center and its branch offices. This growth brings many difficulties.
- Filled data centers. Data growth is creating demand for more storage capacity in the data center. However, floor space or power constraints may hinder expansion. Higher density storage systems may be available to these organizations, but the budget may not allow for the acquisition.
- Terabytes have become petabytes. Many legacy storage systems were designed when 100 TB was a lot of data, but now many organizations need to manage multiple petabytes of data. At petabyte scale, storing, protecting, backing it up, and recovering it all is problematic using legacy solutions. Many IT departments struggle with finding or training staff with the experience to manage these environments. If staff leave, departments may be unable to replace these individuals, placing operations at risk.
- Remote office file data. Managing unstructured data at remote offices brings its own issues. Technology at these locations often lags behind the data center, resulting in different technology throughout the business. Branch office locations typically lack IT staff; thus, remote offices must involve others to recover lost files. File data may use up storage, and backup solutions may rob bandwidth during copies. Consider that a one terabyte file directory can use two additional terabytes of storage for backup and offsite recovery. Further, inactive data grows as no one wants to delete files when unknowns exist. For team collaboration of files hosted at remote offices, latency can become unworkable.
- Storage proliferation. Over time, a company grows and needs expanding storage. However, the current system has not reached end-of-life. So IT adds to it. Now there are two systems instead of one to manage. Two systems become three, four, five, and ten. This growth may take place because of capacity requirements or because of protocol requirements. The effect is the same: An organization ends up with a proliferation of data silos without global visibility into the file estate of its multiple, underlying systems.
- Total cost of ownership. These difficulties increase the total cost of ownership for unstructured data management. Enterprises must factor in the day-to-day expenses of ongoing maintenance and upkeep. In addition, there are the not-so-obvious costs associated with acquiring new storage infrastructure, including cycles for budgeting, researching, evaluating, procuring, installing, and migrating data among multiple storage systems.
The explosive growth of unstructured data creates costly, difficult-to-manage problems using legacy approaches to file data management.
SDS for Cloud-based NAS Consolidation
Cloud-based NAS consolidation, based on enterprise-class SDS, offers a solution for providing fast, flexible, usable access to all an organization’s file data for all of its end users.
Enterprise Cloud-based NAS Consolidation Solutions
In preparing this report, DCIG evaluated twenty SDS solutions for a cloud-based NAS consolidation use case. The general categories under which these features fell included:
- Deployment capabilities
Data protection- Product and performance management
- Documentation
- Technical support
- Licensing and pricing
Data protectionBased on these criteria, the following storage solutions earned a DCIG TOP 5 award (in alphabetical order):
- CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform
- IBM Spectrum Scale
- Nasuni
- Panzura CloudFS
- WekaIO WekaFS
Report Availability
The full DCIG TOP 5 report is available for download immediately at the links below. The full report contains additional details such as:
- A listing of all twenty solutions evaluated
- An overview of the challenges of managing unstructured data growth
- Features shared by all TOP 5 solutions
- A deeper explanation of the key similarities and differences between the TOP 5 solutions
- A profile of each solution that highlights notable features that earned it a DCIG TOP 5 award.
Confidentiality and Copyright
Other than excerpts published in this announcement, the contents of the 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Enterprise Cloud-based NAS Consolidation Solutions report are copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. Panzura and CTERA have licensed the right to distribute this report. Individuals may access the full report at no cost by following the links below.
Panzura: 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Enterprise Cloud-based NAS Consolidation Solutions Report
CTERA: 2021-22 DCIG TOP 5 Enterprise Cloud-based NAS Consolidation Solutions Report
DCIG will release more TOP 5 reports in the weeks and months to come. Please sign up for the weekly DCIG Newsletter to receive notice of their availability.
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