Scale-out NAS to Drive Storage as a Service

There is no doubt in anyone’s mind these days that the growth of unstructured data in the enterprise is out of control. As a result, a significant market opportunity for delivering storage management as a service is starting to gain momentum.

One of the critical emerging technologies that IT organizations are going to be relying on to deal with all this unstructured storage are a new generation of network attached storage (NAS) products known as scale-out NAS, which essentially eliminates the need for controllers in favor of an architecture that allows IT organizations to continually add more nodes of storage as their need for storage space grows. This approach eliminates the whole concept of over provision storage to meet future anticipated needs in favor of deploying storage on an as needed basis.

To facilitate the growth of managed services and cloud computing based on scale-out NAS, Gridstone has launched a new channel program that allows solution providers to pay for Gridstone scale-out NAS products in a way that reflects their actual usage. According to Gridstone CEO Kelly Murphy, solution provider should not have to pay for storage until they are actually using it.

Gridstone recently extended its scale-out NAS product in a way that allows them to support a multitenant platform, which means that solution providers can use Gridstone products within a true cloud computing environment.

The end game, says Murphy, is to allow solution providers to cost effectively deploy enterprise-class storage as a service for small-to-medium businesses at prices that under $500 per terabyte. Given that the success of any service is ultimately dependent on its reliability, Murphy says that any solution provider contemplating storage as a service can no longer afford to ignore scale-out NAS.