High-Performance Compute (HPC) and commercial data centers used to be two distinctly separate entities, but now businesses of all types are conducting HPC-like operations. These organizations have large amounts of unstructured data that they need rapid sequential access to for analysis. Also, many organizations require “Big Manufacturing” which is the design, simulation, assembly and testing of physically large and complex products like airliners. Finally, in our content-driven world, many organizations have aspects of media and entertainment which are made more complicated because of the need for special effects, augmented reality and virtual reality.
Commercial HPC initiatives, like legacy HPC, requires a robust architecture with unique requirements. Although most organizations try to stretch their traditional enterprise storage solutions, they quickly find them lacking the ability to scale and provide the sequential IO performance common in HPC. Traditional storage systems also can’t manage the mixed file size workload common in commercial HPC. Workloads can range from thousands of large files to workloads with millions of small files.
The problem is traditional HPC workloads aren’t a good fit for the enterprise either. They are often open source in nature and have an “erector set” feel to them. Unlike academia, commercial organizations don’t have the time or access to the resources to create a solution from all the loose parts.
In our latest white paper Storage Switzerland examines the rise of Commercial HPC and explains what storage architectures are best suited to meet the needs of Commercial HPC. The white paper is exclusively available to registrants of our webinar “Is Your Storage Ready for Commercial HPC? – Three Steps to Take“.
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Twelve years ago George Crump founded Storage Switzerland with one simple goal; to educate IT professionals about all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought after public speaker. With over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN, Virtualization, Cloud and Enterprise Flash. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.
