[SPONSORED CONTENT] The past few years have brought many changes into the HPC storage world, both with technology like non-volatile memory express (NVMe) or persistent memory, and the growth of software defined storage solutions. Gone are the days when IBM Spectrum Scale (secretly, we know we all still call it GPFS) or Lustre were the only real choices in the market. In retrospect, the choice was easy: you picked one of the two and away you went.  And nobody ever wondered if they made the right choice.