Scalable NAS for Digital Media - Overview & Features

Overview

With 2 petabytes capacity per NAS cluster and the ability to string multiple clusters together, the Scalable NAS solutions provide near endless capacity. Up to 16 ProLiant servers in each cluster can concurrently read the same file, providing easy scalability without any data shuffling for load optimization. And with no single points of failure, your business can provide 24x7 operations without risk of system downtime.

IT staff in organizations that deal with large volumes of data are looking for ways to avoid data replication as a way to scale performance, since it is costly in terms of wasted resources and time consuming to manage. Consolidated storage can result in large increases in asset utilization and much reduced management overhead, but it is only acceptable if it doesn't limit scaling of the solution nor impact the availability. Shared data NAS clusters such as HP’s Scalable NAS mean that IT can build large manageable server and storage clusters that offer exceptional performance, scalability, and fault tolerance, while still achieving leading price-performance numbers.

Solving Customer Issues

• Content must be highly available: Whether you are hosting content to the public in static or streaming application or for internal process flows in digital animation, it is critical that your media assets be online, available, and accessible 24x7 365 days a year.
• Ability to quickly expand infrastructure: Being able to quickly and independently grow storage capacity and overall system performance is critical to your business.
• Competitive pricing structure: In the digital media industry, non-traditional business models require an infrastructure which reaches new levels of affordability, which are often times 2-3 less expensive than traditional approaches.

Features and Benefits

• The HP Difference: The Scalable NAS solution contains a symmetrical cluster file system and file serving architecture for a completely scalable and reliable NAS system. So there is no single server for metadata or lock management, removing any performance bottlenecks and providing linear performance scaling beyond 2GB/s.

• HP Enables:
  • Online performance growth by incrementally adding servers or storage as needed
  • NFS, CIFS or use of HP's PSFS file system for custom applications
  • Thousands of clients accessing petabytes of data
  • Eliminates need for data replication or segmentation for load/performance balancing

• Industry Standards: HP's Scalable NAS solution runs on Linux from RedHat, Novell SuSE, and Windows operating systems. It is compatible with virtually all storage and networking equipment that use industry standard protocols.
• Reliability: HP is the only proven provider of a new category of clustering software that delivers the enterprise class reliability needed to allow customers to standardize and simplify their data centers using industry standard components.
• Automatic Fail-over: Built on a shared-data architecture, HP Scalable NAS software uses innovative clustering technology to deliver a system that has no single points of failure, no hot-spots and automatic and immediate fail-over.
• Customer Results:
  • Achieve over 2GB/s of I/O throughput
  • Eliminate hotspots and I/O bottlenecks
  • Add server nodes without disrupting applications
  • Avoid vendor locking using industry standard servers and storage
  • Manage and backup the storage as a single resource
  • Save over proprietary solutions

Why HP?