File Storage

Organizations today have extraordinarily high expectations and requirements when choosing file storage technology. The most critical criteria include the ability to:

• Strengthen cybersecurity defenses to protect data from an ever-evolving threat landscape.
• Extract value through integration with data analytics platforms for real-time business intelligence and customer insight.
• Provide seamless access to all applications through all protocols.
• Reduce costs in response to shrinking or constrained budgets.
• Improve internal capabilities for collaboration.
• Simplify regulatory compliance.
• Support business continuity and disaster recovery programs.
• Scale easily and provide access to both on-premise and multi-cloud storage from a single namespace.
• Ensure the performance required to support a wide range of workloads.
• Deliver a more pleasing customer experience.

Dell EMC provides powerful file storage solutions that enable organizations to increase performance, capacity and value for a wide range of enterprise file storage workloads.

Dell EMC Isilon scale-out file storage solutions are built for enterprises that want to manage their data, not their storage. The Isilon family of file storage products include the choice of all-flash, hybrid or archive nodes that are simple to install, easy to manage and enable organizations to scale to virtually any size.

Dell EMC’s file storage systems provide:

• Easy management, with features that keep file storage simple no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required or how business requirements change in the future.
• Massive scalability of capacity and performance to meet any business need.
• Automated tiered storage and seamless integration with cloud platforms to reduce costs and optimize resources.
• Unparalleled storage efficiency, de-duplication and compression, helping to reduce storage costs.
• Operational flexibility through multiprotocol support.
• Resilient data protection and robust security and compliance options.
• In-place data analytics to help unlock the value of data capital more easily and cost-efficiently.
  

Dell EMC Unity XT is a 100% unified (file and block) storage solution that is designed for performance, optimized for efficiency and built for a multi-cloud environment. Unity XT provides midrange customers with the ultimate in unified storage management and simplicity that IT organizations want to store, manage and protect their data. The Unity XT family of unified storage products include the choice of all-flash and hybrid storage appliances, software defined storage or Converged Infrastructure systems for business that absolutely need to simplify IT with a turnkey engineered system experience.

Dell EMC Unity XT’s file storage capabilities provide:

• Easy management, with features that keep file storage simple no matter how much storage capacity is added, how much performance is required or how business requirements change in the future.
• u64 file system performance for running transactional and traditional NAS environments
• Scale-up filesystem that scales to 256TB usable capacity per file system with 10M+ sub-directories and files
• Filesystem shrink that will reclaim free blocks and shrink file system to reflect new capacity
• Automated tiered file storage and seamless integration with hybrid cloud platforms to reduce costs and optimize resources.
• Leading storage inline data reduction and efficiency with de-duplication, compression and zero detect that help to reduce storage costs and maximize utilization.
• Operational flexibility through multiprotocol support.
  

The Dell EMC Unity XT product family includes:

• Dell EMC Unity XT All-Flash unified storage systems provide a scale-out filesystem architecture that enables midrange organizations to easily support traditional and transactional NAS workloads. All Unity XT All-Flash arrays are highly optimized for Flash and start in 2U with dual-socket CPUs, more cores and memory to deliver performance and efficiency for the most demanding file-based applications and workloads. Each Unity XT system has built-in data migration capabilities to move filesystem data over from other Dell EMC storage and select third party storage.
• Dell EMC Unity XT Hybrid Flash unified storage systems provide a scale-out filesystem architecture that enables midrange organizations to easily support traditional and transactional NAS workloads. All Unity XT Hybrid Flash arrays are optimized to run Flash in hybrid pools and in All-Flash pools and start in 2U with dual-socket CPUs, more cores and memory to deliver performance and efficiency for the most demanding file-based applications and workloads. Each Unity XT system has built-in data migration capabilities to move filesystem data over from other Dell EMC storage and select third party storage.
• All Dell EMC Unity XT storage supports multiple paths to a hybrid cloud environment including unified cloud tiering appliance, software-defined unified storage in AWS, DRaaS with Faction and validation with VMware Cloud Foundation.

When you choose Dell EMC file storage solutions, your technology is backed by Dell EMC support programs that help to maximize productivity and uptime. With a foundation of experts, tools and technologies, Dell EMC ProSupport Suites shift age-old monitoring and maintenance routines from reactive to proactive, passive to predictive and manual to automated. Continually delivering actionable insight, Dell EMC support services not only extend your IT team but help to resolve IT questions and problems in less time.

What is a file storage system?
File storage, or file-based storage, is a system of storing data, especially unstructured data, in a hierarchical structure that uses files and folders, much like a paper-based filing system with file cabinets and drawers. File storage is the predominant technology used on hard drives and network-attached storage systems.

What is file storage vs. block or object storage?
Object storage is a flat structure where files are broken into pieces, or objects, and spread out over a variety of hardware resources. Objects include a unique identifier that allows the object to be found in a distributed system along with metadata that describes the data. Block storage splits data into evenly sized blocks that each have their own address, but it includes no additional metadata that provides context for what the block contains.

What are the principal challenges of a file storage system?
Data trends such as big data, analytics and cloud storage technologies have resulted in a rapid growth of computer file storage. A growing number of applications that use strictly file-based access has also contributed to the increase in file storage requirements. Managing this growth can be complex, and without the right data storage solutions, data can be isolated in silos or rendered unavailable for retrieval and analytics.