Here’s a factoid: Humans now create more digital data each year than can be stored in all the existing storage systems in the world (which might explain why we don’t keep it all).¹

That’s no surprise to you if you're trying to keep pace with a business need for file storage. Enterprises are facing not just terabytes but petabytes (approaching exabytes) of file data in the coming years.

Adding more discrete file storage systems adds complexity, management and maintenance demands—often creating as many problems as it solves. So, what if you could deploy a system that would scale to suit your needs for many years into the future? That's exactly what HP's next-generation scale-out network attached storage (scale-out NAS) appliances let you do, all the way up to 16 PB and beyond.

The HP StorageWorks X9000 Network StorageSystems are a family of appliances for large enterprises and scale-out environments. These environments need to seamlessly serve, store and scale both data and performance, for terabytes to multiple petabytes of unstructured data.

At the heart of the StorageWorks X9000 is a parallel file system with a single namespace. This system allows files to be located in multiple, disparate physical locations while making it appear to users and administrators as though their files are stored in the one common space. Servers and applications draw from the single namespace without any knowledge of where a file is physically stored. This increases capacity utilization, enables data movement and simplifies management.

Further, when you add new storage resources behind the X9000, its stored files become part of the single namespace. Each StorageWorks X9000 storage appliance brings its own servers, networking and storage with it. So every StorageWorks X9000 you add scales not just storage, but performance, too.

Many competing solutions require expensive add-on software to enable advanced features, such as data tiering and remote replication. The StorageWorks X9000 is an integrated appliance that includes everything you’ll need to aggregate and store your file data. Even if you’re not ready for more sophisticated features today, those capabilities are there when you need them— at no extra cost to you.

With data tiering, you can define rules that automatically assign files to a specific type of storage. Files can be sorted depending on their need for accessibility, performance, security and compliance requirements, among other criteria. The most accessed or most critical data can be placed in the fastest-to-access spot. Data that is accessed less often can be moved to nearline storage and eventually to offline (and less expensive) storage for archiving.

The StorageWorks X9000’s integrated parallel remote replication copies data to another physical location to keep it safe. That’s easy enough if you have a limitless supply of expensive bandwidth, but who does? The StorageWorks X9000 breaks down data feeds into smaller pieces and sends them in parallel over multiple, smaller and far less expensive lower-bandwidth pipes. This feature produces significant TCO savings.

Under other circumstances, managing multi-petabytes of file data could be a terrifying prospect for a storage administrator. But the StorageWorks X9000 masks all of the underlying complexity with a single management console for system configuration and control. This console includes monitoring health status, performance utilization, file system expansion, and server and storage capacity.

On-the-fly rebalancing evenly distributes files across storage to eliminate hotspots and maintain performance levels, all without downtime or a noticeable decrease in performance. If that doesn’t sound like much to you, consider that many storage systems have to go offline for hours to accomplish the same task.

If there’s nothing businesses can do to slow down the data explosion, preparing for the future requires pay-as-you-grow, modular file storage solutions that can adapt. The new HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage Systems can handle your most demanding storage needs.

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