Dell EqualLogic FS7500 NAS appliance with its Dell Fluid File System delivers a powerful combination of performance and scalability for a wide range of use cases and deployment environments. These include file-intensive user shares that are growing rapidly with files of various types; highly-available NAS and unified storage for growing SMB customers who need to keep their storage protocol options open; and virtualization projects that include extensive NFS data requirements in addition to performance demands that are best met by block storage.

Now, is FS7500 right for your file sharing needs?

In Taneja Group’s opinion, you should explore the FS7500 if any of the following statements applies to you:

  • I’m an existing EqualLogic customer managing separate Windows/UNIX/Linux file servers and/or scale-up NAS systems for my user file-sharing requirements.
  • I have too many dedicated file servers, islands of underutilized data, and storage boxes; storage costs and complexity are hurting my storage ROI;
  • It’s too difficult to scale my current file shares and application workspaces because of limitations on my current NAS storage—I can’t keep up with user demands;
  • I spend too much time managing file data across servers to maximize utilization and to ensure adequate performance for a range of users and applications.

Essentially, the Dell FS7500 unified storage solution offers the simplicity of NAS with the scalability and performance of SAN. With its scale-out architecture and FluidFS, FS7500 has overcome the consolidation challenge and the file system scalability challenges that hold back most NAS solutions.

What about virtual environments?

Virtualized workloads can be hosted on two types of network-based storage devices: SAN block devices (most deployments today) using iSCSI, FC, or FCoE; or a NAS device (the popular choice for many new deployments) via CIFS or NFS. The choice of which is best for a particular mix of workloads depends on multiple factors, including current storage investments, storage expertise, and finally, performance and scalability requirements.

If your expertise and application requirements are leading you to a NAS implementation, Taneja Group thinks the answer is yes. The figure below helps you understand the broad range of use cases – from applications running on NAS datastores to hosting virtualized desktops – that FS7500 NAS appliance with its EqualLogic PS series block-based back-end can cover.
Figure 1. Unified storage for virtualization: Consolidating block and file storage with FS7500

Taneja Group’s conclusion: “Put simply, the FS7500 appliance for a unified EqualLogic storage platform lets you keep all your virtualization options open. You can replace standalone file servers with a true scale-out NAS. You can continue to leverage block-based storage for the best virtual machine image performance. And you can also use NFS for virtual workloads where it makes the most sense in your organization. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about making the wrong decision up front, because you can resize, migrate and scale any workload up to the capacity of your high-performance back-end PS Series storage pool.”

The full Taneja Group report is available here – check it out.