What Is Scale Out?

Scaling up is the old way of doing things. You had a storage facility, and it was big. Then you got bigger and needed more space to store your stuff. So, you bought another storage facility and added that to your existing one. Pretty simple, right? What if there was a more helpful way? What if you could add more space for your stuff instead of buying more? That's were scaling out comes into play! When we scale out, we're adding new resources (i.e., hardware) instead of increasing the capacity of current resources to increase capacity. In a cloud storage facility, following a scale-out growth would mean that new storage hardware and controllers would be added to increase capacity. This has two apparent pros: storage capacity is improved, and traffic capacity is also expanded because there is more hardware to share the load. Scale-out is a way of increasing the power of a system by adding more hardware resources rather than increasing the capacity of what you already have. This can be especially important when it comes to storage because storage systems often need more than just more storage space. They also need better controllers and load balancing. There needs to be more than a scale-up approach to increasing capacity in large cloud storage systems to handle increased data traffic if multitenancy and scalability are required. When trying to grow your business, it's essential to know whether you should scale up or out. The old-fashioned way of thinking was to scale up, that is, add more hardware resources and increase capacity. This made sense when hardware costs were high, and it was expensive to throw money at a problem. Now, that computers are relatively cheap and easy to buy, the smart move is to scale out. Instead of adding more hardware resources, you would add more computers or servers instead.