Evolution of Scale-Out Storage Compare to Scale-Up Storage

Abstract: Infrastructure scalability handles the changing needs of an application by statically adding or removing resources to meet changing application demands as needed. In most cases this is handled by scaling up or scaling out. There have been many areas of how it works and architecting for emerging cloud native applications. Scale up is done by adding more resources to an existing system to reach a desired state of performance. More compute, memory, storage or network can be added to that system to keep the performance at desired levels. Scaling-up can also be done in software by adding more threads, more connections or in case of database applications, increasing cache size. Scale-out is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) architecture in which the total amount of disk space can be expanded through the addition of devices in connected with their own resources. In cloud storage deployers deal with multiple parameters like scalability, cost, throughput, reliability, latency and resource utilization. This paper examines how scale out storage is more efficient than scale up with respect to some of these parameters. Infrastructure scalability handles the changing needs of an application by statically adding or removing resources to meet changing application demands as needed. In most cases this is handled by scaling up or scaling out. There have been many areas of how it works and architecting for emerging cloud native applications. Scale up is done by adding more resources to an existing system to reach a desired state of performance. More compute, memory, storage or network can be added to that system to keep the performance at desired levels. Scaling-up can also be done in software by adding more threads, more connections or in case of database applications, increasing cache size. Scale-out is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) architecture in which the total amount of disk space can be expanded through the addition of devices in connected with their own resources. In cloud storage deployers deal with multiple parameters like scalability, cost, throughput, reliability, latency and resource utilization. This paper examines how scale out storage is more efficient than scale up with respect to some of these parameters. Keywords: Cloud, Resources, Storage, Throughput, Virtualization