Hyper-converged or traditional SAN: choosing storage for a mid-size estate
KINNEX Team5 min read
How you store and serve data shapes cost, performance and how easy the environment is to run.
Traditional three-tier
Separate servers, a storage network and a storage array. Each part scales independently, and you can mix vendors. It needs more skills to design and maintain, and more components to keep compatible.
Hyper-converged (HCI)
Servers with local disks, joined by software into one pool of compute and storage. Adding a node adds both. Management is simpler, and it suits small and mid-size data centres and branch sites. Scaling happens in node-sized steps, and licences can be significant.
NAS and simple servers
For small offices, a few virtualised hosts with a network storage appliance or even local disks, plus good backup, may be all that is needed.
Questions to ask
- How fast will data grow, and how predictable is growth?
- Do you need very high performance for databases?
- How much IT time do you have to manage it?
- What is the plan for backup, replication and disaster recovery?
- What are the licence and support costs over five years?
Do not forget
Network speed, power and cooling, and monitoring matter as much as the storage choice. Many performance problems are network problems.