Introduction

by Jeff Whitaker

If you’re like me, you wish you could know ahead of time if reading an e-book will yield a meaningful return on investment. To this end, I hope you won’t mind if I skip the traditional introduction and jump straight to the value of having reliable and simple-to-manage storage that automatically adapts to today’s converging high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads.

Three critical points that not even senior executives can ignore

1. To summarize the convergence at hand and the thoughts of HPC IT teams everywhere: you cannot deploy HPC and AI/ML at scale without the right high-performance storage. Indeed, IDC recently reported that, while AI is growing in importance for enterprises, most AI projects fail because of inadequate or non-purpose-built infrastructure.¹
2. Most HPC parallel file systems aren’t known for their reliability. And in the face of converging workloads and rapidly growing volumes of data, compute requirements are increasing, and data storage failures cost organizations more than ever before. Given this, enterprises need a scalable, flexible, and reliable high-performance storage solution.
3. It’s no secret that HPC left the “back room” and barged into the front room of enterprise IT in nearly all top industry verticals. This convergence of HPC and AI/ ML in the enterprise presents a series of evolving challenges—categorized and covered ahead—that can result in disparate levels of performance, manageability, and security, as well as a lot of attrition.

Put (1) to (3) together and it’s clear: The value of a simple alternative to unreliable HPC storage has turned the corner from “nice to have” to “need to thrive.”

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Why is Panasas uniquely positioned to solve your enterprise HPC challenges?

We know better than anyone else what you don’t want.

You don’t want to pay a hefty price to meet the performance demands for running multiple applications with different I/O patterns and file sizes, or mixed workloads. You don’t want to keep bringing in experts to manually tune multiple storage environments and deal with the management burdens associated with those systems. And, if possible, you don’t want to worry about whether your systems meet data compliance and control requirements.

How do you get what you need? This e-book provides the full answer. Here’s the abridged version:

At Panasas, we continue to add and enhance enterprise features in our storage solutions that rise to best-in-class needs, right where HPC and the enterprise converge. This is the intersection where HPC scalability and performance meet enterprise-grade manageability, reliability, security, and support. This is also where HPC, high-performance data analytics (HPDA), and AI/ML workloads converge for multiple business groups and diverse research groups at academic institutions and research labs. The common thread across all verticals is the need for a reliable, performant, and consolidated storage infrastructure.

Your key takeaway from this e-book

You do not need to compromise simplicity, reliability, or flexibility for high performance. These terms get thrown around a lot in the storage space, so you may be thinking: “Sounds nice, but what does that mean for me and my team?” I’ll tell you:

• Simplicity means easy to install, configure, use, monitor, and manage, starting as a design mandate (not an afterthought).
• Reliability means both the storage system and the data on it are reliable through fault tolerance and self-healing, maximizing uptime.
• Flexibility means running multiple-file-size workloads—from scratch storage to project files to home directories—concurrently, with thousands of users.

We’ve found that staying ahead of the curve in this highly competitive space is easy. It means having a portfolio of data storage solutions built on the world’s leading parallel file system: PanFS^®—the data engine for innovation.

By the way, that’s not just a marketing slogan. It’s the design philosophy of the PanFS parallel file system, where the most innovative reliability algorithms—such as per-file erasure coding, quadruple redundant directory copies, checks on parity, and automatic background capacity balancing—keep the system tuned to the workloads automatically.

Ready to see how we make storage systems run like a fine-tuned race car? Then buckle up and enjoy the view of your next-generation high-performance storage platform.

Clashing Designs and Conflicting Paradigms

The evolution of HPC to Enterprise HPC

Discovering patterns of meaning in your data and extracting valuable insights from it in real time—that sums up the real-world value of emerging technologies. It’s not a question of whether this value is being harnessed by enterprises.² The applications of HPC-driven innovations in AI…

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