Exploring File Storage Challenges and Solutions

Individual file servers are unable to share data across their respective disks, leading to silos of underutilized storage, increased management costs, and both poor scalability and service levels. While a SAN typically provides better performance and scalability than DAS, the high costs of SAN deployment as well as ongoing administrative complexity associated with backup, recovery, security, and availability can undermine the performance and scalability benefits. This paper explores these and other challenges associated with today's complex file server and storage environments, along with key points to consider when addressing these challenges.