Building Scale-out NAS with IBM Storwize V7000 Unified

If you need scalable NAS and what you’re primarily interested in is capacity scaling, with less emphasis on performance, and more on cost-effective entry price, then you might be interested in building a scale-out NAS from Storwize V7000 Unified systems, especially if you have some block I/O requirements to go with your NAS requirements.

There are three ways that I can think of doing this and each has its strengths. The documentation on these options is not always easy to find, so these diagrams and bullets might help to show what is possible.

One key point that is not well understood is that clustering V7000 systems to a V7000U allows SMB2 access to all of the capacity – a feature that you don’t get if you virtualize secondary systems rather than cluster them.

And of course systems management is made relatively simple with the Storwize GUI.