See demo: How to get more file-serving performance

As stock markets worldwide surge and slump in the wake of the financial crisis, it’s critical that your systems are cost-effective and robust, and keep your business competitive.

Protecting the availability of your business’s essential applications is a crucial factor in keeping both your customers and colleagues happy. And of course, you need to achieve this while staying in budget and within the capacity of your limited resources.

One sure-fire way to protect application availability is to virtualise your network-attached storage. This allows you to create a consolidated "shared data" architecture that provides continuous availability.

HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS (network-attached storage) File Service is a simple and cost-effective new solution that easily virtualises the relations between your servers and storage to seamlessly increase application throughput far in excess of traditional NAS products.

More storage access
HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Service is bundled together with the HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array storage solution, file servers, management software, and Windows® or Linux® support. It delivers server and storage virtualisation in a single package.

By virtualising your file-server environment, the integrated solution gives every one of your servers in the cluster access to all of your files. This turns your servers and storage into flexible, dynamic pools of resources that can be applied wherever you decide is necessary.

More flexibility and availability
The 4400 Scalable NAS File Service’s  file-serving software eliminates the physical relations between your servers and your storage. By using virtualised shared file system, the software helps stop restrictive relationships forming between servers and storage. Instead, you get the extremely advantageous situation where all of your servers gain access to all of your stored data. Further, you also benefit from fewer bottlenecks and no single points of failure.

Another advantage of the shared data architecture is your ability to move applications easily from one server to another. It provides you with a highly available and flexible architecture.

The 4400 Scalable NAS will also assist you to reduce server sprawl by easily enabling you to scale up your storage online as required. While the shared pool of file-serving nodes and storage will further reduce your costs by achieving higher server and storage utilisation rates.

More of everything you need for less
In a nutshell, the 4400 Scalable NAS File Service will provide you with a solution that can:

• Seamlessly grow with scaling performance – the more nodes you add, the more performance you gain.
• Consolidate your file-server environment – instead of managing a lot of different servers spread across your environment, your team only have to manage one cluster.
• Provide high availability – thanks to the extremely robust and completely virtualised shared file system architecture.
• Fit your budget – by combining the mid-market EVA 4400 array on your back end and the unique 4400 Scalable NAS shared file system software on your front end, you benefit from an enterprise NAS class solution for a very affordable acquisition cost.

Bundle of virtualised joy
The bundled solution is configured with three file-serving controllers with a dozen 400 gigabyte Fibre Channel disk drives for 4.8 terabytes (TB) of capacity and dual back-end Fibre Channel controllers to guard against system failures. The array scales to a maximum of 16 nodes with 96 TB of capacity using 1 TB "FATA" drives. The 4400 Scalable NAS File Services supports both block- and file-level I/O, and the CIFS, NFS, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols.

For many businesses virtualisation remains an uncracked nut. The HP StorageWorks 4400 Scalable NAS File Service is a perfect opener to help your organisation profit from the exciting performance, simplicity and cost-effectiveness offered by this easy-to-use yet powerful technology.

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