As HPC workloads move to the Cloud, the complexities of data movement and data sharing come into play. Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, Intel’s Jeff Layton asks the question: What happens if we need shared storage in the cloud itself as we usually do in the HPC world?
Using Amazon as an example, there are some initial designs and experiments with NAS in the cloud including some commercial solutions such as SoftNAS Cloud. It’s fairly easy to configure your own NAS solution if you desire using the exact same commands you would use if you were building your own solution. Commercial solutions such as SoftNAS Cloud offer the option of having all of the heavy lifting done for you in exchange for paying for the software (and you get support). In addition to NAS, you can also create parallel storage solutions. For example, in Amazon AWS, there are two options, one for Lustre, and one for OrangeFS (PVFS). Both use the same compute and storage instances that you use for NAS, but you create several instances that are combined to create a single file system. If you need more performance, just add more instances. If you need more capacity, just add more instances. Since this is the cloud, it’s very easy to spin up a new instance and add it to the existing storage.
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