Choosing the best parallel storage solution involves a systematic evaluation of your requirements, the capabilities of available solutions, and how well they align with your objectives. Here’s a 10-step comprehensive guide from Nor-Tech to help you make the right choice.
- Assess Your Workload Requirements
- Workload Characteristics: Understand the types of workloads (e.g., AI/ML, HPC, big data analytics) and their demands for throughput, IOPS, latency, and capacity.
- Data Volume: Quantify your current data volume and expected growth rate.
- Access Patterns: Determine whether your workloads are read-intensive, write-intensive, or balanced—this influences performance needs.
- Concurrency: Estimate the number of simultaneous users or processes accessing the storage.
- Understand Performance Needs
- Throughput: Ensure the solution can handle the bandwidth required by your applications.
- Latency: Low-latency performance is critical for time-sensitive workloads like AI training.
- IOPS[1]. Ensure the solution can handle the expected number of I/O operations, especially for transactional workloads.
- Scalability: Check if the storage can scale to meet future performance and capacity needs without significant overhauls.
- Evaluate Parallel Storage Technologies
- File Systems: Compare the features of VDURA, Lustre, IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS), BeeGFS, CephFS and others to ensure compatibility with your workloads.
- VDURA Data Platform: Hybrid architecture featuring reliability and ease of use; durability and assurance against losing data.
- Combines high performance, reliability, and ease of use in data-intensive environments
- Lustre: Known for high performance in large-scale environments; commonly used in HPC scenarios.
- IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS): Offers robust data management features and scalability, ideal for diverse workloads.
- BeeGFS: Designed for flexibility and ease of use, suitable for both small and large-scale systems.
- CephFS: Provides excellent performance and reliability, handling huge files and directories efficiently.
- Storage Models:
- Distributed Storage: Offers redundancy and scalability.
- Clustered Systems: Provides high throughput by clustering multiple servers.
- Software-Defined Storage (SDS): Delivers flexibility by decoupling storage hardware and software.
- Data Management Features: Look for support for data tiering, caching, and replication.
- Integration and Ecosystem
- Application Compatibility: Ensure the storage supports the applications and frameworks you use.
- Operating System Support: Verify that the solution supports your operating environment (Linux and/or Windows).
- Interoperability: Verify support for standard APIs, protocols (NFS, SMB, S3), and orchestration tools like Kubernetes.
- Cloud Connectivity: If required, look for hybrid cloud support or seamless integration with cloud platforms.
- Analyze Reliability and Redundancy
- Fault Tolerance: Features like RAID[2], erasure coding, or replication help ensure data reliability.
- Backup and Recovery: Ensure the solution offers robust backup and disaster recovery options.
- Uptime Guarantees: Look for solutions with high availability Service Level Agreements (i.e., 99.99%).
- Data Integrity: Check for mechanisms that detect and correct data corruption.
- Focus on Security
- Access Controls: Implement RBAC[3] to manage user permissions effectively.
- Encryption: Ensure data is encrypted both at rest and in transit to protect sensitive information.
- Compliance: Verify that the solution meets industry-specific regulatory requirements.
- Examine Cost Structures
- Initial Costs: Hardware, software, and licensing fees.
- Operational Costs: Ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and power consumption.
- Licensing Models: Evaluate whether the solution offers perpetual licenses, subscriptions, or pay-as-you-go models that align with your budget.
- Hidden Costs: Data transfer fees, support charges, or unexpected costs associated with scaling.
- Total Cost of Ownership: Evaluate costs over the solution’s lifecycle, including potential savings through deduplication or compression.
- Consider Usability and Management
- Administrative Interface: A user-friendly interface can simplify management tasks.
- Monitoring and Analytics: Real-time monitoring tools help in proactive issue resolution and performance tuning.
- Automation Capabilities: Support for automation can streamline operations and reduce manual intervention.
- Support and Service
- Technical Support: Assess the availability and quality of vendor support services; the ideal would be no-wait-time support during business hours with experienced staff.
- Documentation: Comprehensive guides, FAQs, and knowledge bases.
- Training and Professional Services: Assistance with deployment, migration, or optimization.
- Community and Ecosystem: A strong user community can provide additional resources and insights.
- Future Roadmap: Ask the vendor for a clear roadmap with future enhancements and support.
- Test and Validate
- Pilot Testing: Conduct proof-of-concept trials to evaluate real-world performance.
- Benchmarking: Use standardized benchmarks like latency, throughput, and scalability to compare performance across different solutions.
- User Feedback: Gather input from end-users to assess usability and satisfaction.
By systematically evaluating these factors alongside Nor-Tech’s experienced high performance computing sales and engineering team, you will confidently select a parallel storage solution that aligns with your technical requirements and strategic objectives. Contact us for an expert evaluation of your parallel storage needs and the best solution for your situation: 952-808-1000/toll free: 877-808-1010; engineering@nor-tech.com.
Why Nor-Tech is the best choice for your business
Since 1998 we have established ourselves as one of leading providers of quality HPC solutions. Our servers are backed by an expert team that is available to provide support and assistance ensuring that your business always has access to the resources it needs. Contact us for more information or a quick quote: 952-808-1000; engineering@nor-tech.com/ or click on the Contact tab at https://www.nor-tech.com/contact-2018/
About Nor-Tech
Nor-Tech is on CRN’s list of the top 40 Data Center Infrastructure Providers along with IBM, Oracle, Dell, and Supermicro and is also a member of Hyperion Research’s prestigious HPC Technical Computing Advisory Panel. The company is a complete high performance computer solution provider for 2015 and 2017 Nobel Physics Award-contending/winning projects. Nor-Tech engineers average 20+ years of experience. This strong industry reputation and deep partner relationships also enable the company to be a leading supplier of cost-effective Lenovo desktops, laptops, tablets and Chromebooks to schools and enterprises. All of Nor-Tech’s high-performance technology is developed by Nor-Tech in Minnesota and supported by Nor-Tech around the world. The company is headquartered in Burnsville, Minn. just outside of Minneapolis. Nor-Tech holds the following contracts: Minnesota State IT, GSA, University of Wisconsin System, and NASA SEWP V. To contact Nor-Tech call 952-808-1000/toll free: 877-808-1010 or visit https://www.nor-tech.com.
[1] Input/Output Operations Per Second
[2] Redundant array of independent disks
[3] Role-based access control
