Welcome to the third part of this five-part series on choosing storage for your high-performance computing (HPC) solution. In the first two blog posts, I talked about speed and reliability. Now, I will cover a characteristic that seems to go against all basic aspects of HPC: simplicity.
HPC environments are inherently complex. Hundreds or even thousands of systems run in parallel to complete millions of jobs per day in the largest environments. Managing all of these compute nodes along with the network and storage components is a daunting task—not to mention the complexities involved when the environment needs to scale to meet growing demand.
To relieve IT staff of some of these burdens, many companies look toward the cloud for a solution. According to Intersect360 Research, HPC in the cloud grew by 44% in 2017 and is expected to continue growing for the foreseeable future.
Although HPC solutions in the cloud can help simplify operations, HPC comes with its own pitfalls:
Performance bottlenecks from lack of high-bandwidth storage capabilities and low-latency networking
Lack of control over data, including difficulty (or inability) to move it out of the cloud
High cost of storing and moving data in the cloud
In an environment where complexity rules, simplicity is key. Whether you deploy your compute resources on premises, on the edge of the cloud, or in the cloud, the NetApp® HPC solution makes enterprise storage easy.
And stay tuned for the fourth part of this five-part series, in which I will talk about the importance of scalability when you choose storage for your HPC deployment.
Julie Fagan
Julie Fagan has a long career in high-tech solutions marketing. She loves working at NetApp where she gets to focus on bringing the best video surveillance and high performance computing storage solutions to the world along with her awesome co-workers.Alle Beiträge von Julie Fagan anzeigen