question Storage categories

[talw]

I understand that NAS can be splitted to 3 categories:
High-end, mid level and low-end.

Is there more specific breakdown of these categories or something more detailed?

Our software is scalable solution and I want to be specific when I say that we support all systems.
Thanks

 

[blakerwry]

Those breakdowns are manufacturer specific categories used for retail purposes - not an industry standard. There are many solutions from systems integrators (EMC, Dell, HP, etc), retail storage vendors (Seagate, WD, etc), or roll your own solutions which may utilize white box chassis, open source software, and drives of your choosing. Each of these solutions may have a high end option (typically offering increased availability/performance) and a low end option (decreased performance/availability).

If you make software and want to ensure compatibility with any given hardware, I suggest you purchase or recreate a few common setups that emulate your prospective buyers' choices and test/validate with those setups.

 

[talw]

1105

I understand it is not the industry standard. My question is if there is any standard. Our product provide a support to what you refereed "roll you on solution' which also from my perspective has the 3 level breakdown (top. mid and low). I am looking for a nicer way to present it (or standard, if existed).
Basically I want to say that our solution is scalable and to provide the different types of systems. We came across media servers, back up servers, stand alone server.. Is there any type of list I can provide my prospect customers?

 

[ddrueding]

I'd be tempted to specify the maximum that it can scale to, whether that be in TB, volumes, number of machines in a cluster, GB/s throughput, IO/s, etc.

 

[Mercutio]

Perhaps you could do a moderate amount of product research and offer up some baselines of your own. For example, there's probably not a huge difference between a 2-drive Buffalo SOHO NAS and a Drobo 5N. They both have ARM CPUs and a relatively tiny amount of RAM. When you move up to the 8/16-bay units like a Synology 815, they often have Intel Atom CPUs and usually have expandable RAM. High end stuff can probably be best categorized as "Does it need its own equipment rack?" and probably has a NetApp/EMC/Dell/HP logo on it.

It wouldn't be terribly expensive to purchase low or mid-grade gear for testing purposes and if somebody really needs you to validate your product on EMC gear, that's something you can worry about later.

 

[Handruin]

My feeling is once a storage array has redundant service processors for high availability and performance load balancing I typically consider those arrays as high-end or geared for medium to large enterprise business. That feature is very unlikely possible in storage solutions that are built at home or available off the shelf.

As for mid and low tier the lines and definitions for classification become more challenging to define.

What exactly is the software for which you are trying to describe the classifications?

 

[talw]

1063

We developed an SMB (Storage Message Block) stack that can be implemented on virtually any environment. As this solution is scalable and can fit a standalone server to high end storage, I am debating how to divid this spectrum into categories but as I see it, every company has such a different solution that it his difficult to categorized it into few levels accept for high, mid, low..

We obviously need to make our testing on each of our customer's environment rather than EMC, Dell, Netapp systems which have their own implementation (open source or a past acquisition of a company similar to us)