Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Protocols > PowerScale: Home Directory Storage Solutions for NFS and SMB Environments > Introduction
Organizations across industries are challenged by the unprecedented scale of growth of end-user enterprise data. At the same time, IT departments need to ensure that, as the storage footprint of critical end-user grows, they can scale out the underlying storage platform in a way that minimizes the disruption resulting from storage expansions and migrations, while protecting data availability, capacity, and performance.
Dell EMC PowerScale Scale-Out Storage addresses these challenges by providing a highly scalable storage platform that integrates seamlessly with existing environments — both Windows-based and UNIX-based enterprises — while enabling the consolidation of enterprise file services to a single access point. In addition to the ease of scalability and management, a PowerScale storage cluster also provides seamless data protection and recovery, simplifying storage management for both end-users and administrators.
The simplicity of implementing, managing, and scaling PowerScale storage increases business efficiency and while reducing operational and administrative overhead for IT and business users alike. A PowerScale storage cluster addresses the challenges of largescale file shares and home directories as it consolidates existing file services, eliminates file-server sprawl, improves storage utilization and reduces administrative costs.
The ease of implementing, managing, and growing a PowerScale cluster results in high business efficiency with little or no change in administrators’ time or efforts as a PowerScale storage cluster grows.
While home directory services are often categorized and treated as simply a subset of general file services, the workflow and performance characteristics often differ significantly from ‘file services’ as a generalized solution in many cases. This paper is intended to assist storage and file-services administrators in planning for the use cases and technical recommendations specific to provisioning and supporting end user home directories on a PowerScale storage cluster.