Choosing Storage for Your HPC Solution, Part 4: Scalability
Julie Fagan
Welcome to the fourth part of this five-part series on choosing storage for your high-performance computing (HPC) solution. In the previous blog posts, I talked about speed, reliability, and simplicity. In this post, I will cover another key storage consideration for HPC environments: scalability.
One constant in HPC environments across all industries is data growth. For example, a single oil well can generate tens of terabytes of data each week. When added to the massive amounts of new seismic exploration data continually being ingested and new wells being brought online, oil and gas companies are constantly inundated with data.
With the Internet of Things (IoT), manufacturers and healthcare organizations are faced with explosive data growth. It is estimated that just one autonomous car will generate 4,000GB of data per day—more data than 3 billion people combined. Healthcare providers gather tens of gigabytes per data of patient data that helps doctors remotely monitor the health of high-risk patients. What do they do with all this data?
By applying artificial intelligence or deep learning algorithms to IoT data, manufacturers can improve their products, develop proactive maintenance and support, and learn more about their customers’ lifestyles and purchasing habits so that they can provide more targeted products and services.
Some of the ways healthcare organizations use IoT data include monitoring the amount and effectiveness of medications, proactively identifying when life-threatening events like a heart attack might occur, and reducing hospitalization costs by allowing patients to do more recovery at home.
Managing and processing all of this data in an HPC environment requires storage that is fast enough to keep up with compute speeds while providing an underlying infrastructure that can quickly respond to data growth.
The NetApp® HPC solution provides an agile enterprise storage solution that scales easily. Built on a modular NetApp E-Series storage architecture, the solution offers a granular building-block approach to growth that enables you to scale seamlessly from terabytes to petabytes by adding capacity in any increment—one or multiple drives at a time.
Learn more about the NetApp HPC solution, and find out how customers around the world are growing their HPC environments with NetApp E-Series storage.
And stay tuned for the final part of this five-part series, in which I will talk about reducing TCO in your HPC environment.
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.
