Start Small, Scale Big: How to Expand Your Data Storage System in the Face of Hardware Price Increases

Executive Summary

• Buy only the hardware you need now by using intelligent provisioning to allocate virtual space and add physical disks later when prices drop.

• Expand capacity without downtime by adding new drives to your existing data storage pools instantly as your business grows.

• Save on expensive RAM by using faster, more affordable NVMe drives as a performance cache to offset high memory costs.

• Pay only for what you use with a flexible licensing model that lets you increase your data storage software capacity incrementally as you add hardware.

The hardware market shifts and RAM price spikes generated unprecedented challenges for IT professionals and businesses alike. The geopolitical storm that led to a complete change in market conditions made the traditional approach to data storage infrastructure planning increasingly difficult and costly. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for making smart investment decisions that protect both your budget, your system’s scalability, and your business continuity.

Addressing the RAM Price Spike & Overall Hardware Price Increase

DRAM prices have surged dramatically, with year-over-year increases reaching as high as 172% according to industry reports. TrendForce data indicates that conventional DRAM prices rose by 18-23% in Q4 2025 alone, with forecasts suggesting this upward trend will continue well into 2026. Memory module manufacturers like Samsung and SK Hynix are operating at capacity, yet can only fulfill approximately 70% of orders due to overwhelming demand from AI and data center expansion.

The situation is equally challenging in the HDD market. Enterprise hard drives now face lead times stretching from 3 to 6 months, with some high-capacity models (32TB and above) requiring wait times exceeding one year. Contract HDD prices have risen by 4% quarter-over-quarter (the highest increase in eight quarters), driven primarily by massive data center buildouts and AI infrastructure demands.

Silicon Motion’s CEO Wallace Kou summarized the situation starkly: “We’re facing [what has] never happened before, the HDD, DRAM, HPE, HBM, NAND, all in severe shortage in 2026. Most of our capacity [is] sold out.” For businesses planning data storage infrastructure, this creates a fundamental question: How can you build a reliable, high-performance system without overcommitting to expensive hardware that may not be available when you need it?

Benefits of Software-Defined Storage Scalability: Start Small, Scale Big

The answer lies in adopting a flexible, software-defined storage strategy that allows you to start with what you have and scale as your needs and market conditions evolve. Open-E JovianDSS exemplifies this approach, offering enterprise-grade ZFS-based data storage software that separates your system capabilities from the constraints of specific hardware configurations.

Valued at $62.98 billion in 2025, the global software-defined storage (SDS) market is poised for explosive growth. It is projected to climb from $80.55 billion in 2026 to nearly $684.35 billion by 2035, maintaining a robust CAGR of 26.94% throughout the forecast period. This tendency reflects organizations’ increasing recognition that flexible, hardware-agnostic storage solutions provide the adaptability required, especially in uncertain times.

Start with What You Have: Intelligent Provisioning

One of the most powerful capabilities for managing data storage in a resource-constrained environment is intelligent provisioning. Open-E JovianDSS provides two most suitable approaches that allow you to optimize your existing hardware:

Thin Provisioning

Allocate data storage resources on-demand rather than pre-allocating entire volumes. This means you can present larger logical volumes to applications while only consuming physical space as data is actually written. For environments where data growth is unpredictable, thin provisioning can dramatically extend the useful life of your existing hardware.

Overprovisioning

In scenarios where you need to commit capacity to applications but want to manage actual hardware purchases over time, overprovisioning allows you to allocate more logical data storage space than physically exists. Combined with monitoring and alerting, this approach lets you defer hardware purchases until prices stabilize or supply improves, without limiting your application deployment timeline.

Practical Example

A growing business needs 100TB of storage capacity for their virtualization environment, but current HDD prices and availability make immediate full deployment impractical. Using overprovisioning, they can deploy with 60TB of physical storage while presenting 100TB to their VMware or Proxmox environment. As prices normalize or supply improves, they add physical capacity without any reconfiguration of their virtual infrastructure.

Grow Without Disruption – Instant Expansion with Open-E JovianDSS

Perhaps the most critical capability for a “start small, scale big” strategy is the ability to expand data storage capacity without downtime. Open-E JovianDSS’s Instant Pool Expansion feature enables seamless integration of new disks into existing storage pools during normal operations.

This capability transforms how you approach data storage architecture planning. Instead of sizing for peak projected capacity years in advance and paying today’s inflated prices for tomorrow’s needs, you can implement a staged deployment strategy. Purchase what you need now, monitor utilization, and add capacity incrementally as both your requirements and market conditions evolve.

The technical implementation leverages ZFS’s advanced pooled storage model, which allows vdevs (virtual devices) to be added to an existing pool without data migration or service interruption. Applications continue accessing data normally while the pool automatically incorporates new capacity and rebalances as needed.

Flexible Licensing That Grows with Your Data Storage Capacity

The “start small, scale big” approach extends beyond hardware to the software licensing model itself. Open-E JovianDSS offers data storage Extension Licenses that allow you to increase your licensed storage capacity incrementally, matching your software investment to your actual deployment size.

How Open-E Data Storage Software Licensing Model Works:

This licensing flexibility means you don’t need to purchase capacity you won’t use for years. Instead, you can:

• Start with a base license that matches your initial hardware deployment.
• Purchase storage extensions as you add physical capacity to your system.
• Stack multiple extensions – additional storage licenses sum up and add to the total licensed capacity.
• Activate extensions instantly – no reinstallation or reconfiguration required, your system continues running.

This approach aligns your software costs with your actual infrastructure growth, preserving capital for hardware purchases when market conditions are favorable. Combined with the technical scalability features, it creates a complete “pay as you grow” data storage solution that makes financial sense in today’s volatile market.

Smart Architecture Expansion: From Single Node to High Availability Cluster

Budget constraints often force difficult choices between performance, capacity, and reliability. With Open-E JovianDSS, you don’t have to sacrifice long-term reliability for short-term affordability. The software supports a natural evolution from single-node deployments to full high-availability clusters.

1) Start with a Single Node

Begin with a single server running Open-E JovianDSS. This provides enterprise-grade ZFS features, including data checksumming, compression, deduplication, snapshots, and replication, all on standard, commodity hardware. Your initial investment remains protected because the same software license and configuration will scale with you.

2) Add a Second Node When Ready

When business requirements demand higher availability, or when hardware budgets allow, simply add a second server node. Open-E JovianDSS supports multiple HA cluster configurations:

• Shared Storage Clusters: Two nodes connected to shared JBODs via SAS, Fibre Channel, or NVMe-oF.
• Non-Shared (Metro) Clusters over Ethernet: Each node has its own storage, synchronized over the network = ideal for cost-effective SATA deployments and georedundancy.
• Cluster-in-a-Box: Two servers with shared drives in a single enclosure for maximum density.

Both Active-Active (load-balanced) and Active-Passive configurations are supported, with automatic failover for iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, Fibre Channel, and NVMe-oF protocols. The transition from single-node to clustered operation can be planned and executed without replacing your initial investment.

Optimize RAM Data Storage Investment with Tiered Caching Architecture

With unprecedented RAM prices reaching historic highs, every gigabyte counts. ZFS-based storage traditionally relies heavily on RAM for its Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), and more RAM generally means better performance. However, Open-E JovianDSS’s tiered caching architecture provides flexibility to achieve excellent performance even with more modest RAM configurations.

How the Caching Hierarchy Works

• ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache): First-level cache in system RAM, providing sub-microsecond access to frequently used data.
• L2ARC (Level 2 ARC): Second-level read cache on NVMe or SSD devices, extending cache capacity beyond RAM limits.
• ZIL/SLOG (ZFS Intent Log): Write log on fast NVMe for accelerated synchronous write performance.
• ZFS Special Devices: Dedicated fast storage for metadata and small files, further reducing RAM pressure.

NVMe Advantages in Practical Data Storage Approach

When deploying NVMe-based data storage or using NVMe as cache devices, RAM requirements become significantly more flexible. Here’s why: NVMe devices can serve as both L2ARC (read cache) and SLOG (write acceleration), handling workloads that would otherwise demand massive RAM investments.

Modern OpenZFS implementations have also substantially improved L2ARC efficiency. The metadata overhead per cached block has been reduced (approximately 70-96 bytes per record in current versions), making L2ARC more practical even on systems with moderate RAM. The persistent L2ARC feature means cache contents survive reboots, eliminating the cold-cache performance penalty that historically made L2ARC less attractive.

Practical Guidance: Start with the RAM you can afford and deploy NVMe cache devices for your performance-critical pools. Monitor your ARC hit rates and L2ARC effectiveness. You can always add RAM later as prices stabilize, and your cache devices will continue providing value even after RAM expansion.

Additional Data Storage Cost-Optimization Features

Beyond the core scalability features, Open-E JovianDSS includes several capabilities that help maximize the value of your hardware investment:

• Inline Compression (LZ4): Reduces physical storage consumption by 2-3x for typical workloads, effectively multiplying your capacity without additional drives
• Deduplication: Eliminates redundant data blocks, particularly valuable in VDI and backup scenarios
• Unlimited Snapshots and Clones: Space-efficient data protection without consuming additional storage proportional to protected data
• Off-site Data Protection: Built-in asynchronous replication for disaster recovery without additional software licensing
• Hardware Agnostic Design: Run on commodity x86 servers, avoiding vendor lock-in and enabling best-value hardware procurement

Conclusion: Strategic Flexibility in Uncertain Times

The current data storage market presents real challenges, but it doesn’t have to paralyze your infrastructure planning. By adopting a “start small, scale big” approach with software-defined storage like Open-E JovianDSS, you can:

• Deploy with confidence using current hardware availability.
• Defer major hardware purchases until market conditions improve.
• Scale capacity and performance incrementally without disruption.
• Match software licensing costs to actual deployment size with storage extensions.
• Evolve from single-node to high-availability architecture as requirements demand.
• Optimize expensive RAM through intelligent NVMe caching strategies.

The key insight is that your data storage architecture should be a strategic asset, not a constraint. In a world where hardware prices and availability are volatile, the software layer becomes your point of stability and control. Choose a solution that grows with you, and you’ll navigate today’s challenges while building infrastructure that serves you well into the future.