Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: Tips to Consider - Stackify (2024)

By: [emailprotected]

| March 16, 2023

Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: Tips to Consider - Stackify (1)

In the Data Age 2025 report, worldwide data is expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by 2025. The enterprise sector, in particular, generates more than 30% each year. To be ready for a digital future, consider the scaling strategy of data infrastructure beforehand.

Scale-up and scale-out are the main ways to add capacity to your infrastructure. While both solutions perform the same function and the end-user perspective, they solve different capacity issues and needs of the system’s infrastructure.

Let’s take a closer look at scale-up and scale-out architecture, how they differ from one another, and factors to consider when choosing a scaling model.

Scale-up (Vertical scale)

When running massive data centers, you may face the need to increase your machine’s capacity to run larger workloads. In this case, apply vertical scaling or scale-up.

Scale-up is a simple method of increasing your computing capacity by adding additional resources such as a central processing unit (CPU) and Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) to on-premises servers or improving the performance of your disk by changing it to a faster one. To implement this strategy, you do not need to make any changes to your system’s architecture. Cloud computing providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, allow you to scale-up your virtual machine with a few clicks.

Scale-out (horizontal scaling)

Scale-out is another way to add capacity to your architecture. Instead of buying one powerful machine, horizontal scaling means adding simple servers that run a distributed computing model.

This approach is popular among companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Netflix, that want to provide customers all over the world with the same user experience.

Critical differences in Scaling-up and Scaling-out

Before applying one strategy to your data center, consider the following differences.

Performance

While scale-up allows you to increase the performance of existing hardware, as well as extending its lifecycle, scale-out enables you to take advantage of newer server technologies in running fault tolerance, system monitoring, and minimize downtime.

Cost

With scale-up, pay less for licensing and network equipment. Scale-out means higher costs for power, licensing, and networking equipment.

Upgrades

When applying scale-up, consider future upgrades and software support that could be limited by vendor lock-in. Scale-out allows you to take advantage of the latest memory, storage, and processor technology.

Long run

Scale-up does not suit a long-term strategy since the capacity of the servers will be upgraded to the threshold of their performance. The scale-out approach allows you to scale the architecture in the long-term.

Management

With scale-up, you receive a single storage system management, while scale-out includes aggregated management capability.

Simplicity

Scale-up storage is more straightforward, compared to a scale-out system with numerous elements to manage. Thus, to run a scale-up model, you will need server monitoring tools.Stackify’s Application Performance Management tool, Retrace, helps maintain a healthy application. In addition to basic server metrics, performance metrics allow you to monitor your entire stack and provide code level insights into errors and performance issues.

Scale-up vs. scale-out: what to choose for your data storage

Both scale-up and scale-out solve different issues of data centers and should be used for different cases.

When to choose scale-up

  • You need to overcome node-level performance limitations, i.e., store large files that cannot be split into smaller parts across different nodes
  • You need help in handling repeatedly increasing workloads
  • Your organization has a relatively small data set
  • You do not expect to grow your dataset over a 3 to 5 year period

When to choose scale-out

  • The scale-up approach does not deliver the necessary level of performance
  • You need to distribute storage workload across multiple storage nodes
  • Your organization belongs to the Enterprise sector with 30TB to petabytes of backup data
  • You expect a significant but steady data growth over time

Get ready your data infrastructure for a digital future

In this article, we explained what scale-out and scale-up means and compared these approaches and use cases.

To manage data growth, have a solid strategy for infrastructure scalability. To provide the capacity and performance that workloads require, apply either a scale-up or scale-down model. Your choice should be based on the type of workload and your expansion needs.

However, it is a well-known practice to use both approaches to allocate your network resources. For instance, you can use scale-up to handle massive traffic while running the main data center on scale-up machines.
Stackify’s APM tool, Retrace, supports monitoring for both scale-up and scale-out environments with packages to scale either up or out as needed.

Related posts:

  • Top 18 APM Tools (Application Monitoring) You Should Consider
  • How to Monitor IIS Performance: From the Basics to Advanced IIS Performance Monitoring
  • How to Use Performance Counters with .NET Core: Current Solution, Alternatives, and the Future
  • Docker Image vs Container: Everything You Need to Know
  • 7 Essential Best Practices to Follow When Adopting a DevOps Model

Improve Your Code with Retrace APM

Stackify's APM tools are used by thousands of .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, & Ruby developers all over the world.
Explore Retrace's product features to learn more.

  • App Performance Management
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Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: Tips to Consider - Stackify (7)

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Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: Tips to Consider - Stackify (2024)

FAQs

Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage: Tips to Consider - Stackify? ›

Cost. With scale-up, pay less for licensing and network equipment. Scale-out means higher costs for power, licensing, and networking equipment.

What is the difference between scale up and scale out storage? ›

Scaling up vertically means adding more compute resources—such as CPU, memory, and disk capacity—to an application pod. On the other hand, applications can scale out horizontally by adding more replica pods.

Which is better scaling up or scaling out? ›

Future-proofing: Because scaling up uses a single node, it's tough to future-proof a vertical scaling-based architecture. With scaling out, it's much easier to increase the overall performance threshold of your organization by adding machines.

What is the difference between scale up and scale out distributed systems? ›

When you scale up a single database by adding resources such as virtual machines (VMs), it will eventually reach a physical hardware limit. Because data partitions are each hosted on a separate server, if you divide data across multiple shards, you can scale out a system almost limitlessly.

What is the difference between scaling up an app service and scaling out? ›

You scale up by changing the pricing tier of the App Service plan that your app belongs to. Scale out: Increase the number of VM instances that run your app. Basic, Standard and Premium service plans scale out to as many as 3, 10 and 30 instances respectively.

What are the advantages of scaling out? ›

Scaling out allows a market participant to reduce their exposure to a particular stock in smaller volumes, rather than all at once, and therefore take profits while the stock is on the rise, but the upward momentum is slowing down.

What is the difference between scale and scale out? ›

So, "Scale-Up/Down" is about increasing or decreasing the size or power of something, while "Scale-Out/In" is about increasing or decreasing the number of things you have. These terms are commonly used in technology to talk about changing the size or capacity of computer systems or networks.

What are the advantages of scaling up? ›

Overall, scaling up is a strategic move that can bring about numerous benefits for businesses. It opens doors to new revenue streams, increases customer capacity, improves operational efficiency, and ultimately drives long-term sustainability and success.

Why is scaling up difficult? ›

Part of scaling up means hiring more people. The problem is finding the right talent. According to McKinsey, high performing employees are 400% more productive than the average employee. When the roles become more complex, the productivity jumps to 800%.

Which scaling is preferred? ›

Horizontal scaling provides organization scalability and reliability to have more redundancy. It is a preferred scaling method considering distributed architectures. In the case where dividing into multiple servers is essential, an organization must consider if it has a state.

What is the difference between scaling up and scaling out quizlet? ›

Compared with scaling out, scaling up uses fewer but larger computer systems to increase available computing power. Scaling out uses more computer systems of lesser power, often distributed across locations or organized into multicomputer configurations.

What is the difference between scale up and scale out AWS? ›

With vertical scaling (“scaling up”), you're adding more compute power to your existing instances/nodes. In horizontal scaling (“scaling out”), you get the additional capacity in a system by adding more instances to your environment, sharing the processing and memory workload across multiple devices.

What is the difference between scale out and scale up in Hana? ›

For scale up, four to eight BL920s Gen9 8 blades that can be configured in 2/4/8/16- socket partitions, in a number of socket permutations that accommodate mixed workloads and multiple IT tiers. For scale out, up to 48 four blade 8 socket partitions are supported for large in memory analytic workloads.

What is the difference between scaling up and scaling out a business? ›

Scaling up is like a power-up or a boost. You take what you've got and add to the load or replace it with something more powerful. Think of it like when Mario eats mushrooms. Scaling out, on the other hand, is adding more components in parallel to spread out a load.

What is scale out storage? ›

Scale-out storage systems use a group of servers to form a clustered storage array and provide LUNs or file shares over a network—just like a traditional array. However, as the capacity of a scale-out array increases so does its performance.

What is the difference between scale up and scale out in Nosql? ›

Basically, if we have to handle higher computing load and we choose to upgrade the hardware, we call it vertical scaling or scaling up. But if we choose to move to a distributed architecture and add more computers to solve our problem we call it horizontal scaling or scaling out.

What is the difference between scale-up and scale out manufacturing? ›

Scale-out can be straightforward because the production unit remains the same. However, reproducibility can be difficult to achieve. Scale-up, on the other hand, can be more complex and requires more planning, but it can lower the costs of the product in the long term.

What is the difference between scale out and scale-up cell culture? ›

Figure 1: Scale-out of flask-based cell culture operations adds more of the same type of flask into a production workflow, whereas scale-up involves transitioning to a larger culture-vessel format such as a Corning HYPERFlask, CellSTACK, HYPERStack, CellCUBE, or Ascent FBR system or to spinner and shaker flasks ...

What is the difference between scale-up and scale out in Nosql? ›

Basically, if we have to handle higher computing load and we choose to upgrade the hardware, we call it vertical scaling or scaling up. But if we choose to move to a distributed architecture and add more computers to solve our problem we call it horizontal scaling or scaling out.

What is the difference between scale-up and scale out AWS? ›

With vertical scaling (“scaling up”), you're adding more compute power to your existing instances/nodes. In horizontal scaling (“scaling out”), you get the additional capacity in a system by adding more instances to your environment, sharing the processing and memory workload across multiple devices.

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