Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

More capacity plus more performance plus more workloads hosted on NAS solutions may sound appealing. However, these same features that make NAS solutions attractive to organizations also make them targets for bad actors. “

organizations in their produc tion IT environments. Across these NAS solutions, their improved availability, capac ity thresholds, and support for flash characteristics stood out. NAS Solutions Up the Ante on HA To host file services, most organizations expect a NAS solution to offer some level of high availability. Once orga nizations start hosting busi ness-critical applications such as databases or hypervisors on NAS, those expectations increase. To meet these expectations, every NAS solution DCIG evaluated offers a highly available (HA) configuration. However, the type of HA con figuration – and the benefits associated with each one – differ significantly. An active-active configura tion – where both controllers can access all backend internal storage concurrently – repre sents the most common HA controller architecture. More than 60% of the evaluated NAS solutions support this option. An active-active configura tion appeals as the performance of both controllers gets utilized all the time. This contrasts with an “active-standby” HA con figuration where one controller sits idle, only becoming active if the primary one fails. However, even NAS solu tions with active-active HA architecture can reach their limits when scaling into the petabytes. To effectively sup port more capacity, more per formance, or both, more than

30% of NAS solutions scale out in some fashion. Offering federated, mesh, or scale-out options, these architectures permit organi zations to scale a NAS solu tion’s capacity or performance to very high thresholds. These architectures support large HA configurations then manage the NAS solution’s added capacity or performance as one, single logical instance. One Petabyte is the New ‘Normal’ Introducing these new HA architectures enables NAS solutions to scale their internal, managed storage capacity to new heights. Fully 90% of the evaluated NAS solutions scale to support at least one petabyte (PB) of internal storage capac ity. More than 60% of NAS solutions can also scale to sup port at least 10 PBs of inter nal storage capacity. Notably, nearly 20% of NAS solutions can support one exabyte (EB) – 1,000 PBs – or more of inter nal storage capacity. This total capacity does

not include any object stor age a NAS solution may also support and manage. All the evaluated NAS solutions can tier data and files to at least one external cloud object storage provider. Many NAS solutions support two or more cloud pro viders and some even tier data to object storage located on premises. Organizations that manage large amounts of data where only small amounts of it remain active benefit from these increased storage capaci ties. However, supporting more storage capacity may not help when a NAS solution hosts workloads where a high percentage of data remains active. More storage capacity only helps if a NAS solution supports storage media that offers high levels of perfor mance. NAS Solutions Get ‘Flashy’ To meet these storage media performance requirements, all NAS solutions now support flash media. NAS providers offer both all-flash and hybrid storage arrays that may also

support different flash tiers. These flash media tiers may include storage class memory (SCM), triple-level cell (TLC) flash memory, and quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory. To optimize its use of these flash tiers, a NAS solution may sup port tiering data across them. A NAS solution may offer policy-based data management as well as its own algorithms that automatically manage data placement. Organizations may then use these data manage ment options to optimize data placement based on cost and performance. Targets for Bad Actors More capacity plus more performance plus more work loads hosted on NAS solu tions may sound appealing. However, these same features that make NAS solutions attractive to organizations also make them targets for bad actors. Ransomware and hack ers may first come to mind for organizations as potential

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32 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SUMMER 2025