10 Reasons Why DAS is Still Relevant in the Cloud Era

As cloud computing and storage services continue to evolve at a rapid pace, it’s easy to assume that on-premises solutions like direct-attached storage, or DAS, no longer have a place. After all, why deal with the hassles of maintaining your own storage infrastructure when you can outsource it to the cloud?

While cloud storage offers many advantages, you may be surprised to learn that DAS systems still have significant value for many organizations, even in today’s cloud-centric world.

Let’s dive deep and explore 10 important reasons why direct-attached storage remains highly relevant for your IT needs.

1. Provides the Best Performance for Mission-Critical Workloads

When latency and throughput are of utmost importance, such as for high-performance computing, database applications, and other mission-critical systems, direct-attached storage is still the best choice. By connecting storage devices directly to servers without any networking involved, it offers the lowest possible latency and the highest possible IOPS. The direct physical connection means data can be accessed nearly instantaneously without network hops slowing things down. For the most demanding applications that require maximum performance, direct attached storage is unbeatable.

2. Complete Control and Customization

You have full autonomy over every aspect of the storage infrastructure. Some of the key elements you can customize include:

• Drive Selection: Picking the exact drive types, from performance SSDs to high-capacity HDDs, that align with your unique needs. This could mean choosing between SATA, SAS or NVMe drives.
• Capacity: As your storage demands evolve, DAS storage allows you to expand your usable capacity by adding new drives or upgrading to higher-capacity drives. You can control scaling without limits.
• RAID Levels: Customizing the RAID configuration, whether it’s RAID 0 for maximum performance, RAID 1 for redundancy, or any other RAID type depending on the required balance of capacity, speed and data protection.
• Interfaces: Leveraging the ideal interface standards such as SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel, NVMe or even mixed environments to suit application interface requirements.
• Topologies: Deploying drives in topologies like JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 or customized vRAID setups tailored to your workloads.
• Server Integration: Seamless integration with any x86 server architecture from any vendor without cloud vendor lock-in. Full cross-platform flexibility.
• Hardware Acceleration: Ability to add SSD caching, GPUs, FPGAs or other appliances to boost the performance of DAS storage-dependent applications.
• Resource Provisioning: Granular allocation of storage resources like LUNs, volumes and shares for different users and applications.
• Management Tools: Leveraging any OS tools, APIs or third-party software to manage DAS systems according to your preferred methods.

By giving you such an extensive level of control over these various components, it allows you to craft bespoke storage solutions perfectly tailored to the unique demands of your business and workloads. This type of complete control and customization capability is simply not possible with generic cloud storage offerings.

3. Simplified Management and Troubleshooting

When storage is directly attached to servers locally, management and troubleshooting are simplified compared to networked or cloud-based alternatives. Problems can often be isolated and resolved right on the server hardware without involving storage administrators or traversing complex network infrastructures.

4. Built-In Data Security and Compliance

You don’t have to worry about the security of your data as it traverses public networks or is stored in a third-party cloud. This makes it easy to meet stringent compliance requirements too, as you maintain complete custody of encryption keys and have transparency into how and where your sensitive data resides at all times.

5. Lower Total Cost of Ownership

When you factor in upfront storage costs, maintenance, support and other expenses over a 3-5 year period, DAS is still very cost-competitive compared to cloud storage services. There are no unpredictable usage fees that can balloon over time. You pay for what you need upfront, and your costs are fixed and foreseeable. For many organizations, DAS delivers a lower overall data center TCO than renting storage on a monthly basis from the cloud.

6. Fast and Easy Disaster Recovery

Your critical systems and their associated storage are self-contained on the local network, allowing for faster disaster recovery capabilities than cloud-based infrastructure if an outage occurs. Backups and restores are also streamlined since the storage is directly attached. You don’t have to rely on network connectivity to access backup data in an emergency or coordinate with cloud service provider support.

7. Avoid Cloud Egress Fees and Data Transfer Costs

Moving large amounts of data into and, especially, out of cloud storage comes with significant data transfer fees. With direct attached storage, you don’t have to pay expensive egress charges for downloading backup files, migrating data, or accessing archived storage. All data access occurs locally on your LAN without any internet traffic.

8. Better Performance for Cache Storage and Scratch Workloads

While cloud object storage is suitable for large archives and backups, it can’t match DAS performance for cache storage or scratch workloads that involve frequent read/write access. It is deployed as a fast SSD cache tier that delivers microsecond response times for temporary datasets. It also excels for high-performance computing jobs requiring local scratch space.

9. Simplified Migration and Integration

Migrating applications and data to the cloud is a complex undertaking that requires refactoring code, redesigning architectures, and retooling processes. It plays nicely with your existing on-premises IT investments. It integrates seamlessly and allows you to modernize storage at your own pace without disrupting operations. With direct attached storage, you can ease into hybrid or multi-cloud models over time as it works across environments.

10. Better Choice for Edge and Remote Office Deployments

It’s also simpler and more cost-effective to deploy than trying to backhaul all data to a centralized cloud. Edge and distributed scenarios with unreliable WAN links are still better served with local DAS that doesn’t rely on the cloud.

Final Words

Direct-attached storage continues to offer compelling advantages even in today’s cloud-centric world. While the cloud delivers significant benefits, DAS remains the best solution in many situations that demand low latency or high performance. It also provides valuable options for control, security, cost management and resilience that aren’t easily matched. Rather than viewing DAS as outdated, it’s worth reevaluating its role for both new and existing workloads.