A Fast Track to Hybrid Cloud NAS Adoption: An Affordable and Practical Answer for Responding to Unstructured Data Challenges
Executive Summary
All size organizations face unprecedented challenges when it comes to responding to the explosive growth of file data. Unlike the past, much of this new growth comes from non-traditional sources. These sources include application logs, machine generated data, and video communications, downloads, and surveillance, among others.
To handle all this new unstructured data, organizations need access to a lot of storage … and fast. This explains why many want to use cloud storage and the virtually unlimited capacity it offers. The challenge they face is how to get their data from here (on-premises) to there (the cloud.)
Pairing networked attached storage (NAS) with cloud storage to create a hybrid cloud NAS solution often surfaces as an answer. A NAS appliance deploys easily on-premises and provides the fast response times that applications and users need. Marrying it with cloud storage to create a hybrid cloud NAS solution delivers the virtually unlimited capacity that organizations desire.
Three hybrid cloud NAS configurations have emerged that deliver on this concept:
- Physical NAS appliance
- Virtual NAS appliance
- NAS software bridge
Of these three, the NAS software bridge makes the most sense for many organizations. Many already have a NAS appliance in place and simply want to introduce cloud storage to augment it. A NAS software bridge fast tracks them on accomplishing that goal.
The Wasabi Cloud NAS, a NAS software bridge, exemplifies this type of hybrid cloud NAS solution. It requires no changes to an organization’s NAS environment as the existing NAS appliance stays in place. Its software automatically connects to both the local NAS appliance and the Wasabi cloud. Once policies are set, it non-disruptively migrates files to the cloud regardless of size.
Perhaps best of all, the Wasabi Cloud NAS removes concerns about cloud storage cost, management, and performance. It stores all files on a single tier of high performance, highly available cloud storage. It costs one-half to one-fifth of competitive cloud storage solutions plus it possesses no hidden API or data egress fees.
Wasabi Cloud NAS positions organizations to affordably and practically fast track their adoption of a hybrid cloud solution. Organizations may migrate away from NAS appliances while gaining access to the cloud storage they desire. In so doing they address their new data growth challenges without disrupting their current IT environment.
Unstructured Data Growth Challenges Await All Size Organizations
In the past, only the largest of organizations could lay claim to data growth challenges. No more. Now organizations of all sizes must deal with them. One of the drivers behind this growth comes in the number of files increasingly generated by non-traditional sources.
According to IDC, these new, non-traditional data sources will collectively grow annually at about 26 percent. Some data types, such as entertainment data, may grow even faster, at around 40 percent annually.
Further fueling this data growth, more organizations make multiple copies of their original files. They may store these files as backups or copies in other locations. All these copies equate to organizations keeping up to ten copies of the original file.
The creation of all these files adds another twist—more organizations want to archive them. Whether archived for compliance requirements, legal reasons, or for ongoing analysis, archiving introduces still more storage requirements and management overhead.
Taken together, these new sources of file data collectively introduce overwhelming storage and management requirements for organizations. While enterprises can theoretically respond to these new demands, smaller organizations often cannot. These amounts of new file data often strain their abilities to easily, and cost-effectively, store and manage them.