Choosing the right enterprise storage solution for your business is very important. You don’t want to end up with a system that won’t meet your company’s growing needs. To have more scalability in your growing business, you will need storage to expand with your business. Therefore, it is of significant concern for the companies to select according to their data storage policies.
There are many options when it comes to choosing the best NAS system for your data center. Still, there are some considerations before choosing an enterprise NAS storage that can support your business workflow, including security, ease of management, compatibility with other components, performance, and price.
So, before choosing a NAS storage for your business, make sure you consider these most essential three key factors first.
Security for sensitive data
One of the key factors for selecting an enterprise storage device is security. An enterprise storage device needs to be secure, reliable and robust. Companies involved in financial transactions store their customers’ sensitive financial information, which means the data needs an extra layer of protection. Modern NAS systems like StoneFly come with many security features like Anti-virus and anti-ransomware, Immutable delta-based snapshots, Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) volumes, AES 256-bit encryption, and Sync/async multi-appliance/multi-site replication.
Are the drives configured in RAID?
With enterprise data centers that store customers’ data or, for that matter – any data, it is always a good idea to use RAID. This technology allows data to be transferred from one drive to another in case a couple of drives go bad. While it’s not ideal as a backup solution as it won’t be very helpful in case of disasters, it’s still an important feature to have for NAS drives. The most common RAID configurations used are RAID 5, 6, and 10, with RAID 6 and RAID 10 providing the highest redundancy.
Is the price in your budget?
Beginning at around hundreds of dollars, NAS can be purchased as rack-mounted or a small tower. For instance, StoneFly’s smallest NAS appliance is a mini-tower, and the biggest you can go is a 36 bay rackmount that can hold up to a petabyte of storage. But the good thing here is that you can choose to pay for only the storage you need, unlike traditional storage where you have to pay a hefty amount for storage, most of which won’t ever be used. This saves your organization from over expenditure on storage. So if you are on a budget, NAS storage is the best option.
Bottom Line
NAS are more cost effective as compared to SAN in the long run. One reason for this is its simplicity as well as cost. With the deployment of NAS storage, businesses no longer have to purchase costly storage systems, a vast Fiber Channel (FC) fabric, and experts for managing the complex infrastructure.
NAS offers faster data access and a simpler administration. It also provides a significantly simpler configuration which is why it is slowly becoming a standard of enterprise storage in major data centers.