Scalability is the ability to size your IT infrastructure to accommodate changes such as demand for more storage or an increase in the number of users. This can be done in either a vertical or horizontal manner. Vertical scaling refers to increasing the capacity of a single system by adding more memory, faster processing units, or additional storage to an existing server. On the other hand, horizontal database scalability refers to increasing capacity by adding more computers. Adding extra servers is a smart long-term option since you can add them whenever your infrastructure requires them.
In this article, we will talk about the importance of scaling capabilities in a digital workplace and discuss how the Zextras Carbonio e-mail and collaborations platform eliminates the need for exact provisioning and drastically lowers the upfront costs for your organization.
Importance of Scalability
It’s important to note, that some platforms are not designed for smooth scaling. That’s why you should take into account scaling capabilities when choosing or upgrading to a new e-mail and collaboration platform. Having a strategy for a scalable system is vital unless you don’t expect your organization to change size at all in the future.
Every infrastructure can potentially expand in one way or another; however, the level of investment in both cash and effort makes a significant difference. A scalable platform is meant to make infrastructure growth easier by reducing as many technological challenges as possible without requiring too much effort.
Types of Scalability
Scalability may imply different meanings for different people. Therefore it is important to set our grounds before getting deeper into the subject. When we’re talking about the scalability of a system, we usually consider two basic forms:
- Vertical scalability
- Horizontal scalability
Vertical scalability deals with the amount of work that can be done with a single machine, whereas horizontal scalability deals with the amount of work that can be done with multiple machines. In the following, we dissect each type
Vertical Scalability
Vertical scalability or scaling up refers to adding more units to servers, such as processing power, memory, storage, etc. This is especially useful in a sudden increase in workloads needing immediate action. You can always add or remove storage to address your needs, choosing between physical disks, object storage, or object buckets on the fly.
Horizontal Scalability
Horizontal scaling or scaling out refers to adding more units to the infrastructure to balance the workload, such as adding more nodes, spreading accounts and inboxes onto different nodes to better distribute computation resources, and preventing heavy loads on servers.
Carbonio’s storage management system is the key to a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure.
A scaling strategy can dynamically adjust the capacity and scalability of an application, including vertical and horizontal scaling. Scaling tactics might involve adding or removing a single server or a group of servers as well as a hybrid of both vertical and horizontal scaling on the same infrastructure to get higher performance.
You may balance the benefits and drawbacks of horizontal and vertical scaling to determine which is ideal for you, depending on your organization’s needs and applications.
Biggest Obstacles
Whatever strategy – vertical or horizontal – you choose there are obstacles on the road that should be addressed. Two of the most cumbersome and important obstacles growing organizations face are:
- Provisioning
- Expenditure
In the following, we will see how Carbonio solves these problems.
How Carbonio Helps with Provisioning
Every business forms a specific number of appliances and computing need based on the provisioning. Provisioning is the process of constructing your IT infrastructure in order to deliver services to you, your employees, and your clients. Your organizational needs will grow as you expand your business, necessitating additional computational resources to meet new demands.
Carbonio’s storage management technology provides the foundation for scalable and highly adaptable infrastructure. You are not restricted to using only the local system or specialized appliances, and you may use a variety of storage systems, including NFS and object storage. Furthermore, such scaling procedures are carried out on a live production system with no service interruptions.
As a result, there is no need to size exactly your infrastructure for your future needs as you can easily scale up as necessary.
How Carbonio Helps with Expenditure
Eliminating the provisioning needs explained in the previous section gives you a huge advantage in terms of cost-saving since more servers mean more maintenance operations and devoting more resources such as power, floor, etc. There’s no use in maintaining idle and underutilized appliances to address potential needs in the future when new units can be quickly implemented when you need them. This also leads to drastically minimizing upfront costs which are especially significant when facing rapid and constant changes in the size of organizations.
There are many benefits to shifting from capital expense (CapEx) to operating expense (OpEx). It reduces the need for a large IT department to manage your IT infrastructure. For one thing, this will free up valuable time and resources for more productive purposes like innovations, which will only help you be more competitive in the future. What’s more, This also shift frees up cash flow that can be used on other investments that may have better returns than your data center or server farm upgrades. The cash you save can also be used towards acquisitions or strategic investments related to your business.
There are different aspects of Carbonio that help you shift CapEx to OpEx, which is not the main point of this article. However, we should point out that the ability to scale up (vertically) has a significant impact on this shift which open up a slew of possibilities: once again, it frees up essential resources that would otherwise be spent managing onsite infrastructure, making future expenditure more predictable, decreases capital expenses, and minimizes the amount of money spent on hardware. To put it simply, you will make the most out of the infrastructure you have currently on hand.
In today’s competitive business climate, cost efficiency is critical to success. You need a software service that will not slow you down or put you over budget. That is why Carbonio uses a pay-per-use model. In this model, you only pay for tools and services you use at the time, such as high availability, real-time backup, and disaster recovery, and let you decide to add more functionalities in the future; if you don’t use it, you don’t pay for it!
An easily scalable system minimizes the need for exact provisioning for an enterprise and lowers the cost of unnecessary infrastructure appliances.