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With many businesses facing an ever increasing need for storage consolidation to facilitate document sharing, data backup and cloud-based applications, unified storage is an ideal solution that helps manage more data, more efficiently. A unified storage platform combines both modes to offer a single solution which is the most common advantage. Consolidation provides a common platform to allocate and manage growing demands for data storage while improving storage utilization and reducing administrative effort.

Individual unified storage systems are suitable for businesses that need a flexible and scalable solution that is easy to manage. Providing the flexibility to assign storage pools for file servers and application servers without having to buy additional NAS or SAN storage is a chief advantage to customers. It also means they don’t need to worry about over buying or under buying storage capacity or managing both block and file based storage at the same time. Another significant advantage is reduced hardware requirements with unified storage. While storage platforms result in several RAID disk arrays being required, unified storage combines both NAS and SAN functions into a solitary chassis.

Unified storage is highly scalable, and hence businesses can add and arrange as many hard drives as needed for the performance and largest amount of free space. Consequently, unified storage systems show themselves to be generally more cost-effective than a single platform storage solution such as NAS or SAN, while providing the same level of reliability as dedicated file or block storage systems. This reduces the expenditure for disk drives and additional hardware, due to which fewer cables are required. It also reduces the power demands are greatly reduced all saving the customer money over a longer period of time.

In emerging businesses, the key driver for unified storage is server virtualization and storage consolidation. Unified storage allows the provisioning of the highest levels of performance even to the most crucial applications while combining all storage on a single platform, and offers plenty of room to scale upwards as needed. A unified storage solution addresses a number of issues, while also enabling block and file access. There are many that prefer just one storage system, steering clear of specialized storage servers systems, like network attached storage for file-based access or a complicated block-based storage system.

For those businesses looking to double their storage needs within a year or two, and have applications that need file-based access and block-based access, unified storage may be the ideal choice.

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