3 Ways Traditional File Storage is Like a Shark

Now that summer in the Northern Hemisphere is in full swing, and the beaches near our Boston headquarters are regularly clearing out due to sightings of these prehistoric beasts, we thought it would be a good time to talk about the undeniable link between sharks and traditional file storage. Okay, maybe undeniable is a little strong, but give us a few lines to explain.

Sure, there are some big differences. The feared great white shark is one of the ocean’s supreme predators, an agile and ferocious beast capable of devouring anything and everything in its path. Traditional file storage, on the other hand, is a varied, distributed, inefficiently designed conglomeration of electronic hardware. Plus, NAS arrays can’t swim.

Yet here are three things they have in common.

Massive Appetite

The carnivorous great white shark commonly feasts on tuna, rays, seals, sea lions, and other species of swimming creatures. Traditional file storage is equally voracious, but its preferred meal is your IT budget. The traditional NAS vendors often lure in their prey with seemingly palatable capital expenditures, but just when you think they’re satiated, they slowly munch away on more of your company’s money through bloated service contracts and unplanned capacity expansions.

Destructive Capacity

While sharks may ravage a school of fish or an unlucky seal, traditional file storage is equally destructive, setting its sights on enterprise productivity. At a local level, traditional storage works well enough. But once end users start trying to collaborate between distant locations, or access their files from remote sites, they’re saddled with long delays, version conflicts, and other productivity-killing technical headaches.

Fight or Flight

When a shark patrols an area, intelligent swimmers flee. Seals might wriggle up onto the safety of a rock. Human beachgoers hustle out of the water. Traditional file storage provokes a similar flight response within enterprise IT leaders, except today they’re fleeing to the cloud instead of another on-premises storage (shark) vendor. The cloud – and Nasuni cloud file storage in particular – empowers enterprises with a level of speed and savings that the traditional file storage beast simply cannot match.

So in the name of Nasuni’s Week of Sharks, get out of the water and into the cloud today… where the sharks don’t bite!