Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Protocols > PowerScale: Home Directory Storage Solutions for NFS and SMB Environments > Introduction
The successful administration and support of home-directory services in an enterprise environment require that the management overhead be minimized and automated as much as possible.
To be successful at a large scale, enterprise home-directory services require that the management burden be offloaded from an organization’s IT administrative team(s) as much as possible. In most cases, management overhead can be reduced through a combination of environment simplicity and automated management features.
PowerScale simplifies the management of petabytes of file data through automated processes that balance client and internal workloads and capacities: rapid and simple provisioning of storage capacity and storage-related services; automatic generation of snapshot and quota services to protect user data and storage capacity utilization.
The unique architecture of a PowerScale storage cluster enables the following:
This section provides an overview of PowerScale storage capabilities and their applicability to an enterprise home directory services environment.