IT managers and architects these days are feeling a little like college kids leaving home for the first time. They cherish the newly found independence and the unlimited horizon ahead but they still want a strong tie to home base. Transitioning from scale-up to scale-out for secondary storage or data protection and management can be a little scary, like leaving home.

However, executed on-premises, and offering the benefits of web-like, virtually unlimited scalability, scale-out architecture doesn’t have to be scary. Think of it as your data home, offering cloud-like services, greater availability and easy application portability – on-premises. In this brief, we will explore the relative values of scale-up to scale-out and what you should be thinking about when considering a move to a scale-out secondary storage or data protection management platform.