Ken Claffey, CEO, VDURA, on embracing hybrid architectures to optimize storage infrastructure – and ensure sustained competitiveness in the HPC landscape.
Navigating the complexities of storage infrastructure has become increasingly challenging in today’s high-performance computing (HPC) landscape. Decision-makers are tasked with balancing performance, managing costs and ensuring reliability, all while aligning with organizational objectives.
Often, decision-makers find themselves in a position where they must prioritize two of these factors while compromising on the third. However, it is essential to recognize that this does not have to be the case when choosing the right system for you.
Hybrid enterprise storage systems offer a solution that addresses these challenges comprehensively at an affordable cost.
By integrating the advantages of different storage technologies, such as flash storage for speed and traditional disk storage for capacity and reliability, hybrid systems provide a balanced approach that meets the parameters of performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
These systems offer decision-makers the opportunity to optimize their storage infrastructure without sacrificing any critical aspect.
Understanding hybrid architectures is crucial for making informed decisions that not only address immediate needs but also lay the foundation for long-term success. With the HPC market poised to pass $50 billion by 2026, the effectiveness of data storage solutions will stand as a benchmark for organizations striving to scale and maintain a competitive edge.
High-performance computing environments are big and complex by nature. Whether it is advancing scientific research or supporting artificial intelligence (AI) projects, HPC relies on many computers working together. Handling vast amounts of data and keeping all these computers running smoothly requires a capable parallel file system.
Whether it is all-flash or hybrid, this system ensures that all storage devices work efficiently together, keeping things running smoothly and performing at their best. Let us examine these systems further and how a hybrid environment might work better for your organization.
While all-flash storage systems boast impressive performance with lightning-fast data access times, they come at a premium cost that may not be feasible for all organizations, especially those with budget constraints. With pricing for commodity storage devices such as solid-state drives becoming increasingly unpredictable, the total cost of ownership for all-flash systems reaches unattainable heights.
Moreover, the effectiveness of data efficiency techniques like compression and deduplication can obscure the true need of flash-based storage. Note that these efficiency techniques can be applied to hybrid-based systems too, not just all-flash, often making the choice between the two dependent on the price difference between the storage media.
With that in mind, all-flash systems are ideal for use cases that demand the highest levels of input/output (IOPS) or extreme terabyte throughput, such as real-time data analytics and ultra-high-speed computing tasks.
However, for organizations seeking a more balanced approach that optimizes both performance and cost-effectiveness, hybrid environments are an appealing solution.
Hybrid architectures offer flexibility, allowing organizations to customize their storage infrastructure to align with specific workloads and capacity needs. This adaptability ensures that organizations can optimize their storage environment to achieve the desired balance between performance and capacity, while keeping costs in check.
Moreover, hybrid architectures provide scalability, a crucial feature in the rapidly evolving landscape of high-performance computing (HPC).
As data volumes continue to expand, organizations must be equipped to accommodate increasing storage requirements. Hybrid architectures, leveraging a blend of flash storage for performance and traditional disk storage for capacity, offer the scalability necessary to support the dynamic demands of HPC workloads. This scalability empowers organizations to seamlessly expand their storage capacity as needed, ensuring they can effectively meet the evolving challenges of the HPC environment.
However, a crucial component of both systems we have yet to examine are the people ultimately supporting and managing them.
Hyperion Research outlined in its March 2022 User Forum that an expertise shortage will be the number one roadblock for many HPC organizations in the future. Finding the right talent and keeping them will become a major capital investment, increasing ongoing operating and management costs.
Neither of these systems are immune to downtimes and data loss, which can have significant repercussions for organizations, including increased costs and reduced productivity. Ensuring the reliability, availability and protection of data in HPC environments is therefore critical to mitigating the risks.
Hybrid environments leverage a combination of flash storage and traditional disk storage, providing redundancy and fault-tolerance mechanisms that enhance reliability.
By integrating redundant components and data replication techniques, hybrid environments minimize the risk of single points of failure, ensuring continuous access to critical data even in the event of hardware failures.
Furthermore, high availability is essential in HPC environments to avoid disruptions to research and business operations.
When considering which vendor to choose, the HPC storage provider must demonstrate their reliability in terms of ‘nines’, indicating the uptime percentage of their systems, such as 99.999%. Customers should no longer accept poor availability and downtime as these can raise costs significantly, about $100,000 per day a system is unavailable.
Hybrid environments excel in availability by leveraging failover mechanisms and proactive monitoring practices to maintain uninterrupted access to data. With redundant components and failover capabilities, hybrid environments ensure seamless failover to backup systems, minimizing downtime and maximizing availability.
Finally, data protection is a top priority in HPC environments, where sensitive data is frequently processed and stored. Hybrid environments address this concern by implementing robust access controls, encryption techniques and data replication strategies to safeguard data integrity and confidentiality.
By integrating encryption capabilities and data replication techniques, hybrid environments ensure that data remains secure both in transit and at rest, protecting against data loss and unauthorized access.
Embracing hybrid architectures equips HPC organizations with the tools to optimize their storage infrastructure, guaranteeing smooth operations and scalability to handle expanding data volumes.
This strategic move ensures sustained competitiveness in the HPC landscape and positions these organizations to effectively meet the growing public and private organizational demands for advanced computing capabilities.
