NAS Storage

A global nonprofit focused on humanitarian aid and disaster relief needed a reliable way to protect donor records, beneficiary information, and critical operational data. Without a dedicated backup and disaster recovery solution, the organization faced risks from data loss, cyberattacks, and operational downtime. The organization deployed StoneFly’s DR365V M1 Backup and DR Mini Appliance, featuring high-speed NVMe storage, dual 10Gbps network connections, scalable storage expansion, and ransomware protection through Air-Gapped Vault® and immutable backups. Key benefits: Automated air-gapped and immutable backups Faster backup and recovery performance Enhanced ransomware protection for critical data Scalable NVMe, SAS, and cloud storage options Simplified data protection and recovery workflows Cost-effective storage with room for future growth Read the full case study here: https://stonefly.com/case-study/nonprofit-backup-disaster-recovery/

  A multi-campus healthcare organization needed to replace its legacy hypervisor while addressing different storage requirements for EMR, PACS, and backup workloads. Its existing infrastructure made storage expansion costly and created performance concerns during drive rebuilds. The organization deployed StoneFly’s USS Proxmox VE Enterprise Appliance with a totally disaggregated architecture, separating compute, RAID processing, and storage capacity. This allowed each layer to scale independently while providing dedicated storage tiers for different workloads. Key benefits: Independent compute, RAID, and storage scaling No unnecessary compute overprovisioning Consistent VM performance during drive rebuilds Dedicated storage tiers for EMR, PACS, and backups Centralized management through a unified console Read the full case study here: Healthcare System Deploys Proxmox VE with Independent Storage Scaling

 <p>Storage systems are frequently the last infrastructure component to get patched, and often for understandable reasons: firmware updates carry a small but real risk of introducing instability, and taking a production storage system offline for maintenance is disruptive in a way that patching a single application server is not. That reluctance, however, leaves known vulnerabilities exposed for months or years after a vendor has already published a fix, turning a manageable maintenance task into a growing security liability.</p> <h2>Why Outdated NAS Firmware Is a Serious Security Exposure</h2> <p>Storage appliances run their own embedded operating systems and management interfaces, and vulnerabilities discovered in these components are actively exploited once details become public, sometimes within days of a vendor's security advisory. An outdated <a href="https://stonefly.com/storage/nas-storage/">NAS Solutions</a> deployment si...

 <p>Deduplication and compression promise dramatic reductions in the physical storage footprint of a dataset, and vendor marketing materials routinely cite reduction ratios of 3:1, 5:1, or higher. Those numbers are real under the right conditions, but they vary enormously depending on data type, and the CPU overhead required to achieve them is a genuine engineering tradeoff that IT teams need to understand before enabling these features on a production system.</p> <h2>How Deduplication and Compression Actually Reduce Footprint</h2> <p>Deduplication identifies identical blocks of data across a dataset and stores each unique block only once, replacing duplicates with lightweight references, a technique that delivers enormous savings on datasets with significant redundancy such as VM images, backup sets, or user home directories with duplicated files across many accounts. Compression works differently, reducing the size of each individual block by elimina...

 <p>All-flash NAS systems cost meaningfully more per terabyte than hybrid systems that mix flash and spinning disk, and that price gap leads many IT teams to default to hybrid architectures without carefully evaluating whether their actual workload justifies the cost difference in either direction. The right answer depends entirely on the latency sensitivity and access patterns of the workloads that will run on the platform, not on which option looks better on a per-terabyte spreadsheet.</p> <h2>What All-Flash Actually Buys Beyond Raw Speed</h2> <p>All-flash systems deliver consistently low latency regardless of access pattern, whether that is sequential throughput or the small, random I/O that dominates database and virtualization workloads. This consistency matters more than raw peak throughput numbers for most production workloads, since a hybrid system's spinning-disk tier can introduce unpredictable latency spikes exactly when a workload needs con...

 <p>Financial services firms operate under some of the most demanding data retention requirements of any industry, with overlapping obligations from the SEC, FINRA, GDPR, and a growing list of state-level privacy regulations, each specifying different retention periods, immutability requirements, and audit trail expectations. Storage infrastructure that was adequate for general business file sharing rarely satisfies these requirements without significant additional controls layered on top.</p> <h2>Why Generic File Storage Fails Financial Compliance Requirements</h2> <p>SEC Rule 17a-4 requires that certain broker-dealer records be retained in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable format for specific periods, a requirement that standard rewritable file storage cannot satisfy without additional write-once-read-many capabilities layered on top. FINRA imposes similar retention obligations on communications and transaction records, while GDPR adds data subject acc...