Storage News

Storage Networking Architectures for Imaging

Traditional GIS storage systems including storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) systems are gradually hitting performance limitations. According to this report on Directions Magazine, increasing customer demands for better, faster and higher-resolution geospatial solutions have GIS companies looking at scale-out NAS.

"So what are NAS and 'scale-out NAS'? Traditional NAS consists of an intelligent compute server or 'head' in front of any number of disks. That means at scale you either a) reach the limitations of the head to serve read/write requests for data on the disks, or b) must purchase an entirely new - and very costly - system to keep pace with your data growth. When you consider that traditional NAS volumes are limited to 16 TB or less, an NAS system may have tens or even hundreds of volumes within a single appliance, fragmenting critical data and slowing access. Add to this challenge the process of bringing additional, separate systems online to manage data growth and you're left with fragmented data that cannot be effectively accessed or leveraged to drive business operations. In short, traditional NAS creates complexity as data grow and the organizational realities of managing this complexity are simply not sustainable."