Scalable ( capacity & performance ) -Traditional SAN / NAS can be scaled up to a limit, maximum number of controllers it can support or maximum number of drives one can connect to each controller. This defines the real limit for these devices, whereas, with SDS / Distributed Data Storage , there is virtually no limit for expanding the capacity. It is by design, a cloud. You keep on adding new nodes to it and your cluster keeps on increasing. Maintenance is also comparatively easy for these as you can add a new node and remove the faulty from cluster.