Disruptive technology innovations transform a variety of industries at a rapid pace, empowering new resource-demanding enterprise applications and determining business opportunities for the upcoming decades. Despite being still largely unrealised, emerging technologies like IoT, AI and supercomputing will shape our future and outline perspectives for business owners and end users alike. To grow and seize a competitive edge, companies need to embrace the new world of Big Data generated by these technologies.

As organisations grow, so do their processes, data, and network. Organisations therefore need to safeguard future computing infrastructure capacity and performance, in response to both emerging business needs and the transformation of fundamental business processes. A scalable infrastructure allowing the addition of more high-performance computers, servers, and storage systems will turn out to be extremely important for growing companies to handle increasing workloads.

EMERGING CHALLENGES
When dealing with data storage and data backup, network architects either add more expansion units to existing storage (vertical scalability, scale-up) or add more storage systems to a system cluster (horizontal scalability, scale-out). While vertical scalability allows storing more data and is ideal for massive data back-up, horizontal scalability is used if organisations opt to not only add up to storage capacity but also increase in performance capabilities to accomplish the processing of more data volume in less time.

However, a scale-out option often imposes system management challenges even for trained IT personnel as it requires seamless resource integration without workflow interruption. Most importantly, IT administrators must also ensure complete data protection to prevent critical data loss caused by system malfunction or confidential data leaks, which becomes even more complicated due to the exponential growth of data volume. All of these issues might be quite challenging unless you rely on experienced storage solution vendors like Infortrend.

With over 25 years of storage expertise, Infortrend Technology is a pure-play Enterprise Data Storage solution vendor and a public listed company in Taiwan since 2002. Infortrend has recently launched a scale-out NAS product family - EonStor CS - allowing enterprises to process the sheer volume of data via its scalable capacity and linear-increasing performance. The scalability through a scale-out expansion offers an easier and more cost-effective way of managing growing data in agile enterprises while reducing consequent performance bottlenecks. EonStor CS also improves data utilisation and simplifies data management by integrating data from all nodes into one cluster system.

BEST FIT FOR M&E AND HPC
The superior performance and scalability makes CS suitable for a wide range of data-intensive industries and applications, such as Media and Entertainment (M&E) and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

EonStor CS is a perfect fit for today's large and growing post-production studios with more than 10 staff working collaboratively. More than 100PB+ capacity and 100+ GB/s throughput make it suitable for 4K/8K UHD video. The single namespace makes all media files easily accessible by all workstations. Workflow integration with DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere allows simultaneous collaboration between team members.

EonStor CS can also be deployed in an HPC infrastructure involving parallel computing to process, store, and perform complex calculations of massive amounts of data at very high speeds for real-time data analytics and strategy decision making.

It is widely adopted in applications demanding high performance and high capacity, e.g. high-speed research data analysis, real-time stock tracking, oil and gas exploration, automate trading in the financial sector, and AI. EonStor CS is the perfect solution since it allows users to seamlessly expand HPC architecture and can be used as a NAS storage for unstructured documents to be easily accessed by different departments for optimised collaboration.

Being capable of keeping pace with the business' growth, EonStor CS offers an optimal data storage and management solution.

NOT ONLY SCALE-OUT, BUT ALSO SCALE-UP
EonStor CS addresses all the above-mentioned challenges of the contemporary enterprise storage market by providing high performance, capacity and scalability, as well as complete data protection, high security, and easy management.

EonStor CS is a scale-out NAS storage system. By adding more CS units, users get a high performance/capacity cluster system with up to 100+ GBps Read/Write speed and more than 100PB of storage for the needs of future data growth. It also supports an Auto-balancing function that evenly distributes data across all nodes in the system. When many users access data simultaneously, the system shares the workload through parallel processing, solving the problem of a single node performance limitation and effectively improving access efficiency.

EonStor CS supports both horizontal and vertical capacity expansion solutions. The scale-out expansion allows you to add up to 144 storage devices to increase both capacity and performance. The single node performance reaches 2/1.1 GBps Read/Write, while the entire cluster can reach 100+ GBps (Read/Write). The major benefit of using the scale-up option is that the performance won't be compromised as capacity increases. EonStor CS also supports scale-up expansion allowing to add up to 84 disks for increasing storage space. COMPLETE DATA PROTECTION
To prevent critical data loss and ensure continuous storage services, EonStor CS is designed with the support of multi-layer data protection on hard disks, node, and cluster levels. If any of the elements fail, no data will be lost, nor will the system performance be affected.

If a hard disk gets damaged, Infortrend's RAID technology ensures the system runs normally at the same level of performance. In terms of node protection, Replica and Erasure Code protection functions help to avoid downtime from a single node of failure. If a node failure is detected, CS initiates its self-healing function to recover the data from a faulty node. On the cluster level, the Rsync feature for remote backup of the cluster file to a remote cluster or remote NAS can be used.

HIGH SECURITY
For securing critical data, EonStor CS provides SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) and WORM (Write Once Read Many) data protection. SED protects confidential data from being hacked, malware and malicious behavior. It automatically executes full disk encryption when a "write" job is performed by using the embedded encryption key. Encrypted data is decrypted before leaving the drive when a "read" request is met. WORM is especially useful for organisations that are required to meet archival demands and struggling to keep pace with their growing data storage. It provides cost-effective data storage, which cannot be deleted, edited, over-written, or corrupted.

EASY MANAGEMENT
EonStor CS simplifies the deployment and management tasks with both hardware and software designs. EonOne management software provides an intuitive user interface for centralised management of multiple systems, monitoring of performance and capacity usage, and completion of all related system configurations. On the hardware side, EonStor CS adopts a cable-less and modular design, allowing a user to expand nodes or add expansion enclosures without interrupting system operation. EonStor CS also comes with redundant key components such as power supplies, controllers, and fans. These features ensure that enterprises get an extremely robust system that is easier to maintain and reduce the risk of downtime, providing non-stop delivery of services.

CLOUD INTEGRATION
Moreover, the CS cluster supports all-HDD configuration with Cloud Storage integration. Based on different file properties, you can allocate data in different storage pools and set different protection levels for each pool. For example, you can choose Erasure Code to protect massive data while saving the storage space.

EonStor CS can be integrated with enterprise cloud via a single namespace architecture, which allows you to easily manage the node data and cloud files at the same time. This will not only improve file accessibility but also allows remote backup and reduces local data management efforts. EonStor CS supports top cloud service providers, such as Amazon, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and OpenStack Private Cloud.
More info: www.infortrend.com