As the amount of data that healthcare organizations must manage steadily increases, so does the need to guard against points of failure and bottlenecks. Once data sets grow into the petabyte realm, a whole new level of availability, management and protection challenges arise.

How big is a petabyte? One petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes. Organizations dealt with an average of 9.7 petabytes of data in 2018, representing an explosive growth of 569% from 2016. Eventually, some organizations will reach exabyte, which is 1,000 petabytes. One report found that by 2025, the world will be creating 463 exabytes of data each day - the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day.

Given the sheer quantity of the components involved in this level of data storage, there will almost always be one or more components in a degraded state at any point in time within the storage infrastructure. Other challenges that quickly become apparent at the petabyte scale include:

File system limitations

How much capacity and how many files can a file system accommodate?

Disaster recovery

How do you duplicate the data off site and then how do you retrieve it?

Scalability of tools

How do you take snapshots of massive data sets?

Software upgrades and hardware refresh

How do you upgrade software and replace outdated hardware with new?

Performance issues

How long will searches and tree-walks take with large, complex datasets?

Backup and restore

How do you back up a large dataset and how long will it take to restore?

Given these challenges, the need for a new approach to healthcare file storage is clear. Fortunately, when done correctly, a scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) can fulfill this need. Scale-out NAS provides truly scalable performance and an ever-expanding namespace for the consolidation of an organization's file shares and healthcare applications — eliminating file server sprawl, streamlining management, simplifying backup and disaster recovery operations, and reducing costs.

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Make Data an Asset –
Not a Burden

In this paper, we will explore reasons to deploy Dell EMC’s scale-out NAS Isilon. You’ll learn how Isilon:

• Eliminates islands of storage
• Provides predictable scalability
• Offers simple, efficient automated tiering