Scalability: Scale-Up & Scale-Out

Supports both vertical and horizontal scaling, providing flexible options for expanding resources when needed.

Intro 

Nowadays, the amount of data that businesses accommodate and use is growing exponentially. Also, in most cases, the production workload is not static, meaning that businesses, most likely, deploy new applications to improve the current environment and drive business growth. Therefore, more CPU and RAM resources are needed. Most solutions on the market are scalable, but how to understand the best approach in your case? 

Problem 

The Scale-Up process is one of the approaches to increasing the capacity, performance or compute resources of a production environment. While it seems straightforward, you are still physically limited by the number of slots, supported CPUs and RAM modules. 

The Scale-Out on other hand allows you to overcome the limitations of number of physical slots in a single/multiple servers, forming a scalable cluster. However, different solutions approach scale-out differently based on the architecture itself that might introduce high CapEx just to increase storage, compute or both. 

Solution 

High Availability clusters with StarWind VSAN are compatible with both Scale-Up and Scale-Out. You can, at any time, add more components to your cluster if you have free physical slots for additional RAM, Storage and CPU resources. And if you don’t have one, you can always go with Scale-Out approach (which in StarWind VSAN case, called GRID. You can read more here: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/grid-architecture-page) 

If you feel that you need to scale your infrastructure, just decide which approach is better for you, plan and execute the scaling.  

For example, you are running low on RAM memory available for your production, but you have plenty of storage and CPU resources available. If you have a free RAM slot, you only need to add another RAM module to support your current needs. If you have a picture of how your business and therefore your data will grow, you can plan ahead and understand which approach will cover your needs in the near and far future. 

Feel free to contact StarWind support team or your Account manager if you need help or have some questions regarding scaling your StarWind-powered HA clusters. 

Conclusion 

StarWind VSAN gives you freedom of choice about how exactly you want to scale your system by being able to support both Scale-Up and Scale-Out. By the end of the day, it is your system and your choice how exactly you want it to serve you and your business.