Network Storage

As organizations consider network storage solutions to help simplify and improve data management, there are several critical challenges that must be addressed.

• Governance. CIOs must ensure that the company can access the value in its data while ensuring compliance with policies, laws and regulations. The right network storage solution must provide tools that deliver clear visibility into how data is being used and where compliance issues may arise.

• Interoperability. Data storage systems are inevitably made up of incredibly diverse data sets stored on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems and platforms, whether acquired organically over time or through mergers and acquisitions. The right network storage solutions must enable these systems to cooperate seamlessly so that analysts, developers and data scientists can focus on using data rather than on the mechanics of storing it.

• Accessibility. Superior network storage solutions must provide self-service mechanisms for security and forensics teams, developers, compliance groups and IT operations to easily access copies of production data.

• Cost. The growth of data inevitably outpaces the growth of IT budgets to store and manage it. Data administrators need data and network storage solutions that can reduce expense by streamlining management and providing cost-effective storage choices for tiered storage. 

• Performance. In a marketplace where real-time analytics are a competitive differentiator, network storage solutions must minimize latency and maximize availability for users and analytics platforms.

Dell Isilon, a family of powerful network attached storage solutions, meets and exceeds all the criteria that organizations require in a network storage solution. As a distributed file system designed for demanding enterprise file workloads, Isilon products are easy to manage, highly efficient and offer massive scalability without disruption. The Isilon family includes:

• Dell Isilon All-Flash, delivering extreme performance and efficiency to accelerate demanding file workloads.

• Dell Isilon Hybrid storage, speeding access to massive amounts of data while significantly lowering the cost and complexity of a broad range of enterprise file workloads.

• Dell Isilon Archive, helping to reduce the cost of storing and protecting aging data assets while providing accessibility with speeds that nearly rival primary storage.

In contrast to the traditional network storage systems, Dell Isilon solutions are flexible, efficient and simple to manage, and they stay simple no matter how much performance is required or how much storage capacity is added. Isilon systems easily integrate with a variety of cloud services, while built-in data analytics support enables organizations to quickly unlock data value to accelerate digital transformation.

Dell Isilon provides an ideal platform for AI data analytics at scale, which require massive parallel file IO. Without the right network storage, performance of analytics platforms can quickly become a bottleneck as concurrent compute threads grow, impacting wall clock times for analytics jobs, slowing model development cycles and limiting innovation. 

Dell Isilon scale-out NAS provides the performance and concurrency to keep pace with even the most data-hungry analytic algorithms. With Isilon, you can:

• Simplify analytics by consolidating, managing and analyzing all data in one place while deploying a broad variety of analytics applications.
• Easily scale data volume and concurrency to accommodate data analytics growth while optimizing server costs.
• Eliminate I/O bottleneck to improve accuracy and speed time-to-insight.
• Streamline management of network storage and data analytics.

What is network storage? 

Network storage, or network attached storage (NAS), is a device for storing data that is connected to a network and allows authorized users to store and retrieve data in a centralized location. Network storage systems are scale-out, allowing organizations to easily add additional storage as needed.

What are the benefits of network storage?

Network storage systems provide:

• Simple management and operations, enabling more self-service by average users rather than requiring help from expert IT professionals.
• Easier and automated data backup to ensure data integrity and improve data protection.
• Easy scalability – organizations can quickly add additional storage capacity as needed.
• Easier collaboration between users.