Dell ESG Lab Review - Dell FluidFS v5 Documentation

ESG Lab Review Dell Fluid FS v5: Flexible and Secure Scale-out File System Date: February 2016 Author: Aviv Kaufmann, Senior ESG Lab Analyst and Mike Leone, Senior ESG Lab Analyst Abstract: This ESG Lab Review documents hands-on testing of Dell’s Fluid FS v5 scale-out file system with a focus on validating the latest enhancements in the areas of simplicity, scalability, and data governance. The Challenges Due to their simplicity and flexibility, NAS storage solutions have proven invaluable to enterprise organizations as in- house solutions for file sharing, backup, and archive needs. The emergence of server virtualization, private and public clouds, and the need to support an ever-increasing mobile workforce has led to increased demands in the performance, capacity, security, and connectivity of NAS storage solutions. With an ever-increasing need to manage and protect a growing amount of unstructured data, it is no small surprise that respondents to ESG research have identified hardware costs, rapid data growth rate, data protection and migration, and staff costs as top storage challenges faced by enterprise organizations.1 Storing, protecting, and managing access to such a large mount of unstructured data is costly both in terms of capital expenses (hardware and software) and operational expenses (management and expertise). Figure 1. Top Five Storage Challenges of Enterprise Organizations In general, what would you say are your organiza6on’s biggest challenges in terms of its storage environment? (Percent of respondents, N=373, top five shown)

Hardware costs 27%

Rapid data growth rate 26%

Data protec\on (e.g. backup/recovery, etc.) 26%

Staff costs 23%

Data migra\on 23%

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2016.

With so much unstructured data to manage and protect, traditional scale-up NAS storage solutions are no longer sufficient. Organizations require a NAS solution that can scale out, grow capacity and performance on demand as needed, bridge the gap between SMB and NFS with a single global namespace, and remain in compliance with security, government, and organizational regulations. 1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 Data Storage Market Trends, October, 2015 The goal of ESG Lab reports is to educate IT professionals about data center technology products for companies of all types and sizes. ESG Lab reports are not meant to replace the evaluation process that should be conducted before making purchasing decisions, but rather to provide insight into these emerging technologies. Our objective is to go over some of the more valuable feature/functions of products, show how they can be used to solve real customer problems and identify any areas needing improvement. ESG Lab’s expert third-party perspective is based on our own hands-on testing as well as on interviews with customers who use these products in production environments. This ESG Lab report was sponsored by Dell. © 2016 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.