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Put Your Things Away with MacStadium’s Five Storage Options

With one or more of our five storage solutions your team will be ready and able to focus on the work at hand. We break them down in this piece.

Messy room with computer stuff

Storage may not be the most exciting part of the average developer's workflow, but the fact remains, computation without data doesn’t yield much of anything. So, it stands to reason that your data has to live somewhere and probably for a good long while.  The interesting thing about storage is that the longer something needs to be stored, the more valuable it must be, and the more of it you will probably end up with, because, well, you always keep it. Oh, storage…

Don’t spin out. MacStadium is here to help. With one or more of our five storage solutions, your team will be ready and able to focus on the work at hand, rather than finding a way to keep track of your data while you’re away. If you’ve got some data that you can’t afford to lose or to spend your time worrying about, check out the following:

1. Internal SSD Solid State Drives (SSDs), while similar to Hard Drives (HDDs), SSDs have no moving parts and store data using flash memory, rather than magnetic tape.

Pair it with: Orka Nodes (Mac Pros or Mac minis), VMware Mac Pro, Bare metal mac mini or Mac Pro. Typical use case: Bare metal Mas, local storage and caching for clouds. Advantages: Greatest speed / lowest latency option, Caveats: low / no redundancy, limited capacity

2. External USB An external drive that plugs into a physical USB port on a racked server.

Pair it with: Bare metal Mac mini or Mac pro, Typical use Case: Backups for single servers or bare metal Macs, additional image storage, general storage. Advantages: Low-cost way to add storage to your bare metal Mac. Caveats: single point of failure, limited by USB transmission speed

3. NAS Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a file-level, storage server that is connected to a network and provides data access to its associated network of client machines.

Pair it with: VMware Mac Pro, Bare metal, Mac mini or Mac Pro. Typical use case: Backups, centralized storage for small clouds. Advantages: Low cost, capable of scaling across multiple Macs. Caveats: Single point of failure for storage, limited throughput due to magnetic disks

4. Pure FlashArray An array of flash drives (as opposed to HDDs). Because there are no moving parts within these arrays, as you will find in an array of HDDs, they are also referred to as solid-state drives (SSDs).

Pair it with: VMware Mac Pro. Typical use case: image storage via iSCSI or fibre channel. Advantages: Deduplication and compression makes FlashArray ideal for high-performance block level storage of similar files and VM images, very high availability. Caveats: requires iSCSI or fibre channel, higher cost

5. Pure FlashBlade Advanced file and object storage geared towards storage on the largest scales, like consolidating complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes).

Pair it with: Orka clouds, VMware Mac Pro. Typical Use Case: NFS storage / unstructured data, scale-out. Advantages: FlashBlade speed and capacity increases virtually linearly as quantity of blades increases, which means consistent performance. As NFS utilizes existing IP infrastructure, there is no need to deal with legacy fibre channel limitations. Caveats: Being based on NFS, FlasBlades is only available to our cloud customers who are secured behind a firewall

Takeaways:

MacStadium offers a wide range of storage solutions in terms of both cost and use case. If any of the above seem like they may ease your storage headache, please reach out to our sales team to see how we can make this a reality for your team. Likewise, if you have some new questions kicking around in your mind, hit up our exceptional account people to learn more!