Storage Switzerland Report Highlights Gridstore's Scale-Out NAS as Excellent Alternative

PRLog (Press Release) - Nov. 16, 2011 - Mountain View, Calif.  – Gridstore™, the leader in scale-out NAS solutions, today announced the findings of a report by analyst firm Storage Switzerland that highlights scale-out NAS as an excellent alternative for grid storage over clustered storage models. In the report, “Scale-out NAS Storage Grid vs. Cluster: Which Storage Infrastructure is Best For the Modern Data Center?”  Storage Switzerland’s lead analyst, George Crump compares grid storage to clustered storage approaches and determines that scale-out storage via a grid design is gaining in popularity for meeting the demands of the dynamic data center.

According to the findings by Storage Switzerland, a clustered, scale-out storage system is built a node at a time. In addition, each node is responsible for volume management, snapshots, replication and cloning and places a burden on each node in the scale-out cluster. To resolve this issue these systems must have multiple processors, multiple cores and multiple network connections to keep up with the amount of work they have to perform behind the scenes. This adds cost and complexity with the likelihood of a node failure which can have a cascading effect on the rest of the infrastructure.

On the flip side, scale-out NAS storage systems with a grid architecture, like those offered by Gridstore, take a different approach to addressing the scalable storage challenge. Storage Switzerland acknowledges that Gridstore’s NAS solution is an excellent alternative to the shortcomings of scale-out cluster-based storage.

“Scale-out storage continues to grow in popularity but many customers, assume that cluster -based, scale-out storage is their only option, simply tolerate its shortcomings,”  said George Crump, lead analyst, Storage Switzerland. “Grid storage solutions like those available from Gridstore are an excellent alternative. By eliminating the cost, complexity and overhead of a cluster, these solutions provide scalable performance and capacity at a more cost effective price point while raising the bar from just high availability systems to completely fault tolerant systems.”

Gridstore uniquely combines virtualization with a grid processing platform to deliver a single pool of storage that simplifies management while increasing performance, scalability and reliability. The virtualized storage pool is built from simple, low cost storage blocks of various capacities. Gridstore provides incremental capacity scaling so customers can start small and incrementally add nodes to grow capacity to any size they need.

“With Gridstore’s scale-out NAS solution, every organization can have a true storage grid designed from the ground up without the complexity and risk of monolithic, clustered storage alternatives,” said Kelly Murphy, CEO, Gridstore. “And, as Storage Switzerland has confirmed in their report, Gridstore brings significant advantages over clustered approaches to deliver higher performance, fault tolerance and 3X less wasted capacity – all at a price point that is changing the dynamics of storage.”

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About Gridstore
Gridstore is the leader in scale-out Network Attached Storage (NAS) products. The Gridstore Scale-out NAS solution uniquely combines virtualization with a grid processing platform to deliver a single pool of storage that simplifies management while increasing performance, scaling and reliability. The Gridstore system is designed for organizations who struggle with the risk, cost and complexity of storage sprawl and who need enterprise-class storage without the cost and complexity.  Founded in 2007, Gridstore is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and has development facilities in Dublin, Ireland. For more information, please visit: http://www.gridstore.com